In last week’s inaugural Swift Notes, I wrote about how in the past year Taylor Swift has been popping up in unexpected places, from crafting to debates about grammar. I was surprised to find her in a recent newsletter from the wonderful songwriter Phil Elverum, AKA Mount Eerie (and previously the Microphones), about his frustrating attempts to be heard in a Washington State government hearing on a bill proposing regulation of the ticketing market. (Sign up here – he writes really beautiful missives.)
Ticketing has been an emotive issue for artists and consumers in the wake of controversies around dynamic pricing – prices changing according to demand, a practice controversially used by Bruce Springsteen – and, of course, the chaotic US Eras tour sale through Ticketmaster in which all the tickets were sold in an advance presale for registered fans, leaving none for general sale. Swift rebuked the company for making “excruciating” mistakes and apologised to fans who felt they had endured “several bear attacks” to get their tickets. At the same time – albeit not as a direct response to the Eras debacle – the US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that it would investigate Ticketmaster and the promoter and venue operator Live Nation – which merged in 2010, giving them control over a vast swath of the live music industry – for alleged antitrust practices. Despite 2016 legislation against ticket-scraping bots – which has only resulted in three prosecutions from the Federal Trade Commission – they continue to proliferate.
Meanwhile US industry bodies the Better Business Bureau and the National Independent Venue Association, along with Ticketmaster, were telling Swift fans who missed out on the official sale to beware of “speculative” tickets on the secondary market – namely listings for tickets that the so-called vendor doesn’t yet possess but intends to acquire, a practice that is, astonishingly, legal in all but a few states. (In May 2023, the UK government also declined to act on Competition and Markets Authority recommendations to ban the practice.) In the absence of strong regulation regarding both ownership and conduct, says Kevin Erickson, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Future of Music Coalition, bad practice has become standardised: Swift fans had to make it through the Ticketmaster gauntlet to even see the ticket prices, and had 90 seconds to decide whether to proceed or risk forgoing them to try to find cheaper ones, and were then hit with further opaque fees once they reached the checkout. Last year Cure fans endured the same thing, despite the band’s commitment to keeping prices affordable, and a furious Robert Smith convinced Ticketmaster to refund some fees.
The need to address this wild west has garnered bipartisan support in the US: there are two proposed federal bills that are likely to languish in the current sclerotic Congress session, meaning that it will come down to individual state legislatures to address the issue. Where Congress moves slowly, states, which have to conduct their annual business in brief windows, move so fast that policymakers often don’t have time to become fully informed on issues or consult the musicians and venues most affected by them, which also leaves politicians vulnerable to lobbying from secondary ticketing companies with limitless resources. (Additionally, Live Nation more than doubled its federal lobbying spend from $1.1m in 2022 to $2.4m in 2023.) “There’s a lot of catching up to do that has to happen for the artist community to get invited to the table,” says Erickson.
In Washington, Elverum wrote, he was invited to speak at a hearing regarding bill HB 1648 – AKA the Ticket Sales Warrant Integrity, Fairness, and Transparency Act (AKA, yes, TSWIFT) – that he perceived did not go far enough to prevent speculative ticketing, which affects indie artists like him as much as they do superstars like Swift, only to be denied his moment. The bill passed in committee, he wrote, without it seeming musicians’ concerns had been heeded at all. In a video of proceedings, he wrote, “these legislators are all giggling making Taylor Swift references in their comments. Ha ha, so funny. It’s glaringly obvious that they prefer to keep their understanding of the real issues affecting people like me at a very surface level. They know about an artist who is going to sell out a sports stadium and that’s it.”
Fortunately for Elverum and his local community, the bill eventually died at the committee vote – but the incident shows the Whac-a-Mole-style efforts to create a more consumer and musician-friendly ticketing market, as well as the ways in which Swift’s example can both illuminate and obscure the issue, allowing lawmakers to misleadingly invoke her name to appear that they are addressing fans’ concerns. One of two proposed federal bills, the BOSS SWIFT Act, bears the names of Springsteen and Taylor but takes its cues for what industry reform should look like primarily from the secondary companies, says Erickson.
“Companies like StubHub, Vivid Seat, SeatGeek have been rather successful in appropriating legitimate public frustration with Ticketmaster to advance an unrelated policy agenda that’s mostly about maximising their access to inventory, to continue to be able to get as many tickets as possible and sell them at inflated prices,” he says. Erickson explains that BOSS SWIFT would eliminate legitimately helpful fan-to-fan resale sites and require “transparency of hold”, meaning that artists and venues have to disclose how many tickets will ultimately be available ahead of sale. “That sounds reasonable until you understand that that’s incredibly helpful to the brokers making their purchasing decisions,” he says. “It doesn’t benefit the individual family who just wants to buy a ticket to be able to attend the event.”
Fortunately again, says Erickson, the bill lacks support from the musician community and is unlikely to pass. There’s also the Fans First Act, which requires full advance fee disclosure to avoid surprises at the checkout, strengthens the 2016 the Better Online Tickets Sales Act and prevents speculative ticketing, though it may succumb to the slow roll of Congress. “The artist community is prepared for the passage of federal legislation to be a longer fight,” says Erickson. “These reforms take time but there’s also the incremental reforms in the states that help tell the more accurate story of what the problems are, who’s responsible for them and, in time, help us build federal momentum as well.”
One state that could change the tenor of the conversation is Maryland, says Erickson, with a bill sensibly titled Commercial Law – Consumer Protection – Sale and Resale of Tickets (no tawdry Swift puns here) that will be voted on at the end of the week. It requires all-in ticket pricing on the primary and secondary market – ie no nasty surprises at the checkout – the enshrining of the right to resell tickets, albeit with limitations on their markup as well as the fees that a secondary ticketing marketplace can charge on those sales, and the outlawing of speculative ticketing.
I spoke to Senator Dawn Gile, one of the bill’s four Democrat sponsors, who said they had consulted with local stakeholders from musicians to small theatres: even a local production of The Nutcracker was affected by secondary markups, while another venue found speculative tickets being sold for mezzanine and balcony seats “when the theatre doesn’t even have a mezzanine, nor a balcony”, says Gile. “The issue is pervasive. It’s been eclipsed by the topic of these really popular shows, but it’s not just Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé that are affected, it’s our smaller venues here.”
Gile has faced the strenuous lobbying efforts of the secondary marketing industry. “It’s funny,” she says. “When speaking to StubHub and others, they claim that the speculative ticket is like a gig-worker service so you don’t have to wait in line, and you’re paying for that convenience. But I think that argument is pretty unavailing because it’s being sold as a ticket and what they’re doing is really hedging their bets on getting that ticket later.” Additionally, says Gile, these companies are “suggesting that somehow if we move forward with this legislation, we’re not going to have any shows come to Maryland ever – that we’re effectively killing the live entertainment industry here.” The argument is disproved, she says, by the fact that several states already cap the secondary market – including the razzle-dazzle centre of Las Vegas – “but obviously the live entertainment industry continues to exist”. Her bill, she says, “just removes the incentive from brokers from being able to try to profit off the consumer”.
The state of affairs is partially a result of the market dominance of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, says Gile (“it’s really incumbent upon our federal government to act”) as well as the normalisation of the idea of a ticket as a commodity ripe for profit. “There’s the argument: ‘There’s a buyer and a willing seller, who are we to impact free market capitalism?’ But the thing is, it’s not a free market, and that’s the same reason why we have regulations [for] the sale of stocks, securities and corporate securities – because there’s deception and manipulation of the market. One thing that’s really evident from the pervasiveness of ticket brokers, the invasiveness of bots and speculative tickets, is that it is a manipulated market.”
Here’s where Swift is a helpful example, says Erickson. “If the most powerful woman in the music industry can’t control the problem of unregulated resale, clearly that’s an indication that elected officials have to step up. That neoliberal, ‘let the market take care of itself’ approach has profoundly failed artists and consumers.” This moment, he says, could highlight the value of live music beyond the price of a ticket. “There is an opportunity here to accomplish a shift in how we think of music and the arts and live events as not just about something that has economic value, but to talk about the intrinsic value of live music as a vehicle by which communities form, a vehicle for historically marginalised voices to be heard, a way that communities define themselves. Policymakers at all levels have a responsibility to centre the voices of music communities who are imperilled by the rise of extractive business models.”
You only have to look at the photos coming out of each date on the Eras tour, in which thousands of teenage girls are having their first live music experiences, to see the vast potential for community activation: here are the roots of future lives spent in music so that they might one day look back, as Phil Elverum does in his beautiful 2020 epic Microphones in 2020, on how they were shaped by it: “I will never stop singing this song,” he sang. “It goes on forever.”
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Get it off my desk: the best Swift coverage elsewhere
It’s been a relatively quiet week in Swift coverage, so here’s the latest on the various moves to bring ticketing under control in the US.
Taylor Swift ticket uproar drives states to crack down on bots (Bloomberg Law, 29 February) A roundup of the six states – including Swift’s childhood home state of Pennsylvania – moving to limit ticket scalping bots.
Taylor Swift v Ronald Reagan: the Ticketmaster story (The Verge, 21 March) This in-depth episode of the Decoder podcast looks into the Reagan-era policy changes that allowed Ticketmaster to dominate the live events business so thoroughly.
Last month the DoJ sought new information from Live Nation in its antitrust probe (Reuters, 6 February) following concerns that Ticketmaster isn’t cooperating with the investigation, but the latter could be imperilled by a spending deal to keep the federal government operating through September that would curb funding available to antitrust enforcers (Bloomberg, 4 March)
Hits different: a non-Swift playlist
The New Eves – Astrolabe I keep managing to miss this Brighton band live: affiliates of the Broadside Hacks collective and friends with Cornish folk musician Daisy Rickman (tipped in our 2024 ones to watch), they remind me of the Roches and the Raincoats, and have all the mess and rough edges that I find missing in the Last Dinner Party’s similarly racked romanticism. (Follow the weekly Hits Different playlist on Spotify.)
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