The D.C. Council on Tuesday unanimously approved an act aimed at reining in the increasingly expensive and unruly resale ticket market around concerts and other live entertainment events in the District.
The Restricting Egregious Scalping Against Live Entertainment (RESALE) Amendment Act caps the price of resold tickets at 10% more than their original value. Tickets to sporting events are not subject to the law.
The act also bans speculative ticketing, when resellers list tickets they don’t actually have, and surveillance pricing, when costs are determined by a user’s personal information. The latter amendment does not apply to senior or student discounts. The bill also requires anyone selling 50 or more tickets a year to get a license. If it receives the mayor’s approval and passes a congressional review, the law is expected to go into effect in January.
The bill received support from local venues including the 9:30 Club and the Anthem. Advocates argued that resellers on sites such as StubHub have hurt independent venues and artists.
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“I’ve been tracking the [resale prices] on our shows, and it’s infuriating, it’s horrifying, it’s grotesque, and it does not need to happen,” Audrey Fix Schaefer, president of the board of the National Independent Venue Association, told NOTUS.
Schaefer — who is also the communications director for IMP Entertainment, which represents 9:30 and others — first wrote to Ward 6 council member Charles Allen about creating the bill last year. She said she believes the city’s indie venues are having a hard time nurturing local talent and maintaining their autonomy because skyrocketing resale costs lead to less engagement and a loss of revenue.
Critics of the act argued that it could give too much power to primary market operators such as Ticketmaster and could drive the resale market underground, where it would be less regulated.
The act passed the first of two necessary votes late last month. Allen, who authored the bill and the amendment banning surveillance pricing, told NOTUS he wanted to help protect independent venues’ sustainability.
On Tuesday, Ward 2 council member Brooke Pinto introduced an amendment that stripped the mayor’s authority over the regulation of fees in the primary ticket market, which she believes would make local venues less desirable for artists and promoters.
“First and foremost, we would be the only jurisdiction in the nation that regulated the primary market in this way,” she said ahead of Tuesday’s legislative meeting. “I don’t think that’s good for consumers. I don’t think that’s good for our competitive market.”
In the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote, left-leaning advocacy group New Democracy sponsored ads that urged constituents to oppose the bill due to potential threats to a “free and transparent marketplace” that could empower Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation Entertainment. Ads say the act would not stop Ticketmaster from raising prices, but would punish fans looking to sell tickets they already own.
In April, Live Nation was ordered to pay nearly $10 million to District residents for using “deceptive ticketing practices.”
Ticket Policy Forum Executive Director Brian Berry, whose organization represents vendors including Stubhub and SeatGeek, was one of several signatories of a letter sent to Allen seeking to exclude venues with a capacity of 3,000 seats and higher. That amendment was not included in the bill.
“The question has never been whether consumers deserve strong protections — they do. The question is how to achieve them,” Berry wrote in a statement after the vote. “The answer is greater transparency, stronger competition and consistent rules that apply across the entire ticket ecosystem, not bills like the RESALE Act that reduce choice, increase fraud, and ultimately keep control of ticket prices in the hands of the very monopoly Washington, D.C.’s own AG is working to dismantle.”
John Breyault, vice president of public policy at the National Consumer League, said he believes the RESALE Act could push legitimate ticket exchanges to unregulated markets like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist.
“You’re going to increase the risk of fraud, and so consumers are right not to like to pay above face value,” Breyault told NOTUS. “But they’re really going to hate it if they start paying for tickets and then never actually getting them because there are ticket scams out there.”
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