Ted Cruz Wants to Screw Up Concert Ticketing Too

Attentive Hearing Things readers may remember the TICKET Act, a bill that would enact several new federal regulations on the concert-ticketing industry, from an investigative feature we published on the state of the industry back in October. At the time, it had recently passed the House of Representatives but its future in the Senate was unclear. Now there’s an update: The bill was reintroduced into the Senate last week, and is being reviewed and potentially amended by the Commerce, Science and Technology Committee today. Naturally, Ted Cruz, who leads that committee, is trying to fuck it up.

The TICKET Act isn’t perfect, but the version that passed the House would clearly improve the industry for fans and artists. One of those improvements was a ban on the absurd practice of selling so-called speculative tickets: That is, when a ticket scalping company, usually operating on a site like StubHub or Vivid Seats, sells you a “ticket” that it doesn’t actually possess, and then attempts to buy it—presumably at a lower price than what you just paid—once it has your money in hand. Sometimes, this transaction happens before the tickets have even gone on sale.

There’s no good outcome for the ticket-buying fan in this scenario. Either the scalper is able to find the tickets you asked for, in which case, you could have bought them directly from the source, sans markup. Or the scalper fails to get you a ticket and you keep your fingers crossed for a timely refund. Any sensible person with the best interests of the ticket-buying general public in mind could see the value in trying to curtail the practice.

Cruz, always eager to burnish his reputation as a snivelling caricature of an evil politician, has proposed an amendment to the TICKET Act that would reverse its ban on speculative tickets, according to advocates. The proposed amendment is not yet public on the Senate’s website, but Fix the Tix—a group of independent music industry advocates, like the National Independent Venue Association and Future of Music Coalition, who are reliably on the side of actual fans and artists in fights like these—published an open letter to the committee last night, urging it to reject Cruz’s amendment, along with a few other proposals aimed at making the ticket industry better for fans.

Our earlier feature about the ticketing industry was meant to demonstrate the ways that the secondary-ticketing industry—that is, professional scalpers and the marketplaces where they sell their wares—has historically hijacked the debate about regulating tickets, using widespread resentment of Ticketmaster to make itself look like the good guy in comparison and advance its own goals, which are generally just as bad if not worse for fans and artists. If Cruz proves successful at twisting the TICKET Act to protect one of the most obviously exploitative practices in the industry, it will be just another example of the same dynamic at work.