From hundreds of invalid Bad Bunny concert tickets during his world tour to Taylor Swift fans experiencing hours-long wait times for tickets costing thousands of dollars a pop, confidence in the ticket selling industry has taken a huge hit in recent months.
And in Colorado, Sen. Robert Rodriguez wants to change that.
Rodriguez, D-Denver, introduced Senate Bill 60 to the state legislature last week. If passed, the bill would make several changes to the state’s consumer protection law regarding ticket sales and resales for events, including classifying many common practices in the industry as “deceptive trade practices.”
“I'm just trying to give more protections to people who want to buy tickets to a concert,” Rodriguez said. "As somebody who has bought tickets and then got fraudulent ones or was turned away and never got a refund or anything, it's not happy. Then I hear other stories of other people that had that happen too.”
Under the bill, deceptive trade practices would include:
• Selling a ticket without having possession of it — such as “speculative ticketing,” which happens when resellers list tickets that they do not own yet or that have not gone on sale yet
• Selling a ticket that does not match its advertised description
• Selling a ticket without disclosing the total cost including service charges and other fees
• Increasing the price of a ticket once it has already been selected for purchase
• Using copyrighted or similar web designs, URLs or other symbols to sell a ticket, leading consumers to believe they’re buying from an event’s official ticket seller instead of a reseller
• Using computer software, or bots, to automatically purchase a large number of tickets or circumvent ticket limits — which was outlawed federally in 2016
Engaging in deceptive trade practices would result in a fine of $10,000 to $20,000 for the first violation, $25,000 to $50,000 for the second violation, $100,000 to $200,000 for the third violation, and $1 million to $2 million for the fourth or any subsequent violations.
Rodriguez said his intention with the bill is to increase transparency and make the ticket purchasing process better for customers.
However, opponents of the bill argue that it would actually benefit the one company that’s been behind the recent ticketing fiascos: Ticketmaster.
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A portion of the bill would allow an event operator to revoke or restrict tickets that are purchased or sold through deceptive trade practices.
Laura Dooley, head of global government relations with StubHub, said this would give ticket selling companies like Ticketmaster the authority to determine whether their reselling competitors have engaged in deceptive trade practices.
“Unfortunately, what we might see is the law being weaponized against competitors,” Dooley said. “A consumer who may decide to buy a ticket from StubHub or Vivid Seats or SeatGeek, if the team that they bought the ticket from decides that what we're doing is not okay, they can just cancel that purchase and that ticket is no longer valid.”
This could explain why Live Nation — which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010 — has registered in support of the bill. Meanwhile, Vivid Seats, another resale company, is registered in opposition.
“Our industry is dominated by one entity, namely Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” Dooley said. “When we look at consumer protection laws, we want to make sure that they're applied equitably across the entire industry to benefit the consumer and not necessarily to benefit the original ticket seller.”
Rodriguez said the intention of that portion of the bill is not to target resellers but to instead put the power back in the hands of artists and venues. He said he plans to meet with StubHub and other opponents of the bill to work out how to avoid any unintended consequences.
Dooley said StubHub would be willing to support some aspects of the bill, including price transparency and not reselling tickets they don’t have the rights to.
“This is a good conversation to have about where we're going with ticket sales,” Rodriguez said. “We could fix all of this if we went back to paper tickets ... but against my better wishes, I don't see paper tickets being a reality anymore. So, we have to face the direction we're going with technology.”
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