StubHub Slams Live Nation’s ‘Anything But Fair’ FAIR Ticketing Act Proposal

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Amid last week’s announcement of record earnings of $16.7 billion in 2022, Live Nation came out with guns blazing about last month’s Senate hearing examining the ticketing industry — which was fiercely, if one-sidedly, critical of Live Nation’s Ticketmaster division — and took aim at the secondary ticketing market, which it identifies as the major problem facing the industry and concertgoers worldwide.

As part of that counter-offensive, it announced what it calls the FAIR Ticketing act (full details of which can be found here), the basic tenets of which state: that “artists should decide resale rules,” which would be an effort to allow artists to take the lead in preventing exploitative prices on the secondary market; would “make it illegal to sell speculative tickets,” addressing scalpers’ habit of tricking fans into buying tickets that do not yet exist; would “expand the BOTS Act,” to combat the widespread use of ticket-buying bots on the secondary market; “crack down on resale sites that are safe havens for scalpers,” which would force secondary-market sites to police the activity on their platforms more aggressively; and “mandate all-in-pricing nationally,” which would address the processing and other fees that often are not revealed until very late in the sale process.

On the face of it, those proposals sound reasonable and a strong counteraction to the excesses of the ticketing industry — but as StubHub, one of the world’s largest ticket reselling platforms, pointed out on Friday, the act is missing any mention of Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s behavior.

As the largest live-entertainment company and the largest ticketing company in the world, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have often