This One Weird Email Helps Explain the Horrible State of Concert Ticketing

Everyone knows buying tickets to a major artist’s concert can be awful these days. If you’re lucky enough to get them straight from Ticketmaster, the cost will be inflated with fees, which one federal government study found added 27 percent to the stated ticket price on average. But even getting the chance to purchase directly from the company that controls virtually all ticket sales for big concerts (and sporting events) in the U.S. is starting to feel like playing the lottery. 

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was the most notorious recent example: In 2022, Ticketmaster crashed due to overwhelming demand, leaving many fans without tickets. According to the company, the problem was exacerbated by bots that bought up tickets to be marked up and resold on the secondary market. In other words, those poor Swifties were thwarted by ticket scalping, a practice that in recent years has grown from a sleazy way to make a few bucks to a multi-billion-dollar techno-dystopian nightmare of an industry.

The factors that brought us here are complicated, and talking about them in any detail is a good way to get your friends at the bar to stop listening and start sneaking looks at their phones. Which is why I’d like to show you an email that the then-legislative director for former U.S. Representative Bill Pascrell, a Democrat from New Jersey, sent to the offices of other Democratic congresspeople last year. 

The email, forwarded to Hearing Things by a source under the condition of anonymity, helps to shed light on why we haven’t seen more federal legislative action that would make ticket-buying a little less miserable. It has everything you might want from a leaked email: misdirection, intrigue, corny Taylor Swift puns. What it shows, ultimately, is that the legislative discussion around ticketing—unsurprisingly, and like just about every other sphere of U.S. government policy—is awash in money and influence from corporate interests that are more concerned with strengthening their own bottom lines than the public good. We’ll get to all that in a moment. But first, some background. 

Rep. Pascrell died at age 87 in August, as the second-oldest member of the House, while this story was in progress. His largely progressive legacy includes longstanding opposition to Ticketmaster’s monopoly on the concert-ticketing industry. In 2009, he led a coalition that hoped to block the company’s merger with the events-promotion giant Live Nation on antitrust grounds. The same year, he introduced a bill that aimed to regulate both Ticketmaster and the so-called “secondary sellers” who peddle marked-up tickets on websites like StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid Seats. The bill did not pass. Though Pascrell introduced various updated versions over the years, as recently as 2023—that’s what the leaked email is about—it has continued to stall, and at this point is highly unlikely to become law, making way for two pieces of ticketing legislation that currently stand a decent chance of passing. (Pascrell’s former legislative director did not respond to a request for comment on the email.)

Pascrell’s 2009 bill, known as the BOSS Act in honor of his home-state hero Bruce Springsteen, was an admirable attempt to solve a complex problem. It took into account the reality that there isn’t just one evil entity to blame for the state of ticketing, but multiple parties: Ticketmaster on one hand and the secondary sellers on the other. Making matters trickier, those two sides’ interests are often in fairly direct opposition—which, as the email demonstrates, can create an illusion that the secondary ticketing industry has found useful in its efforts to guide public policy: the notion that what’s good for them must also be good for the average concertgoer, simply because it’s bad for Ticketmaster. But the reality is more like a King Kong vs. Godzilla scenario: Just because the two monsters are fighting doesn’t mean one of them is the good guy. The BOSS Act, had it passed, would have helped to knock them both down a peg.

However, as the bill languished, and Pascrell reintroduced new versions, its language shifted in subtle but important ways. It began to include new provisions that would benefit secondary sellers, and to drop previous ones that would have impeded their business. A line from the 2009 bill that would have prohibited secondary sellers from buying tickets within the first 48 hours of them going on sale was gone by 2016. 

The version of the bill that Pascrell introduced last year to the current Congress was even more clearly beneficial to the secondary market, with provisions that would have actively hampered future attempts to reform it. One common-sense way to spare fans the nightmare of being asked to pay $10,822 for a single Taylor Swift ticket—a real number I found on StubHub while searching for seats to an October 19 show in Miami—would be to institute some sort of price cap on ticket resales, so that a ticket purchased for $100 could only ever be resold for, say, $125. Pascrell’s 2023 bill, rechristened the BOSS and SWIFT Act after the Eras Tour fiasco, would have made such price caps on the secondary market illegal, enshrining as law the idea that anyone who buys a ticket is free to resell it for as much as they’d like. 

Just because the two monsters are fighting doesn’t mean one of them is the good guy.

I can’t say what effected Pascrell’s apparent change in attitude about secondary sellers, turning him from a lawmaker who sought to rein them in to one who seemed quietly inclined to protect them. But I can say that he received a combined $10,200 in campaign contributions over the last three election cycles from individuals associated with TicketNetwork, a multi-million-dollar scalping company based in Connecticut that has taken a particularly active role in attempting to shape policy and public perception in the secondary industry’s favor. (That number, along with other information about federal campaign contributions in this piece, was sourced from the campaign finance database Open Secrets.)  

One lobbying firm also claims partial credit. A case study published by the Herald Group, lobbyists retained by the secondary-seller trade group the National Association of Ticket Brokers (NATB), explains the firm’s successful efforts to get Pascrell on board with its client’s agenda. These efforts included PR campaigns to present secondary ticket sellers as valuable small business owners, and to link support for ticket brokers with opposition to the widely scrutinized Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger. In other words, they were exploiting the King Kong vs. Godzilla effect, positioning ticket brokers as a heroic adversary to Ticketmaster rather than an equal contributor to the industry’s problems. “Through these public affairs efforts,” the Herald Group’s summary reads in part, “Rep. Pascrell transitioned from attacking brokers and the secondary marketplace to appearing several months later at a press conference in Washington as well as an earned media event with a local NATB member in his District.” (Spokespeople from Pascrell’s office, and from the Herald Group, did not respond to requests for comment.)

The press release for Pascrell’s introduction of the BOSS and SWIFT Act in 2023 even included a quote of endorsement from the executive director of the NATB about how the bill, with its protections for the secondary market, would ensure that consumers would “have more than one expensive and overbearing source from which to shop.” He neglected to mention that the entire secondary market is predicated on making tickets more expensive than they would be from Ticketmaster, the “expensive and overbearing source” that his quote nods at without explicitly naming. According to the Kansas City Star, face-value tickets to see Swift in Kansas City in 2023 ranged from $49 to $499, plus whatever fees Ticketmaster tacked on. On Vivid Seats, one of the NATB’s many member organizations, tickets to an upcoming Swift show in the fairly comparable market of Indianapolis range from $2,197 to $20,924. 

“We are almost Out of the Woods before we hit August and tragically the domestic chapter of the Eras tour [ends],” the weird email from Pascrell’s legislative director opens, “but there is still plenty of time to co-sponsor Rep. Pascrell and Pallone’s updated BOSS and SWIFT ACT (H.R.3660) that continues our Fearless quest on behalf of consumers to improve the ticket market.”

The email, addressed to the legislative directors of fellow House Democrats, includes 10 more tortured and italicized references to various Taylor Swift songs. The timing was auspicious: It was sent July 11, 2023, one day before representatives from the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) were scheduled to meet with members of Congress to advocate for a coalition initiative known as Fix the Tix, which hopes to curb some of the excesses of the secondary ticket market via a Senate bill called the Fans First Act. (There are a lot of attempts at catchy slogans and titles in this story, so it may be helpful to note that Fans First and Fix the Tix are relatively interchangeable, the former a piece of proposed legislation and the latter a coalition of industry groups that support it.) The email discourages Pascrell’s fellow congresspeople from supporting Fix the Tix—“Long Story Short, these proposals are not always as straightforward as they appear…”—and encourages them to back BOSS and SWIFT instead. 

In fact, the Fans First Act does appear to be straightforwardly good for concertgoers. It includes proposals like a ban on the sale of “speculative tickets”—that is, tickets that the seller does not actually own at the time of the transaction—and on the use of websites that are meant to look like official venue homepages, but are actually fronts for secondary sellers. Google “Jones Beach tickets,” for instance, and you might end up on JonesBeachAmphitheatre.com, a site totally unaffiliated with the Long Island venue. At the top of the page, there’s a banner with the venue’s name and advertisements for upcoming shows. You have to scroll down or click a link to find the disclaimer: “This site is not operated or owned by Live Nation or the Jones Beach Theater.” When you attempt to purchase tickets to a show, you are redirected to the secondary seller Ticket Squeeze, where, in August, you could have purchased tickets to an upcoming James Taylor show for an $80 markup over face value, even though there were still plenty of face-value seats still available on Ticketmaster. (Ticket Squeeze did not respond to a request for comment.)

Between the use of these sorts of websites and speculative ticketing, a secondary seller could dupe you into paying more for the very same ticket you could have purchased via Ticketmaster at face value, using website designs that might give you the mistaken impression that you’re dealing with the box office. (According to NIVA, StubHub and Vivid Seats began selling thousands of speculative tickets to the hotly anticipated Oasis reunion tour—at prices “likely exceedingly higher than the face value”—before the actual tickets had even gone on sale.) Fix the Tix isn’t an outright ban on scalping for a profit, or even a price cap on resales, but it would at least help people to avoid overpaying in this manner. And neither of the aforementioned attempts to stop it are present in BOSS and SWIFT’s supposed reforms on the secondary market.

The Fans First Act would be good for artists and venues, too, because the secondary sellers’ markups only serve to make concerts more expensive for fans without actually benefiting those who are putting them on. It has the support of NIVA, a trade group that was launched to help independent venues weather the pandemic, and of hundreds of artists big and small: Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Fall Out Boy, Conor Oberst, Julien Baker, Kim Gordon, and many others signed an open letter in favor of it earlier this year. United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) and Music Workers Alliance, two grassroots organizations supporting musicians’ rights, are both members of the Fix the Tix coalition. Even major players like the Recording Academy and Universal Music Group are on board. The level of consensus that Fans First is a good idea is remarkable in a music industry that is anything but monolithic in its concerns. You’d be hard-pressed to find another issue that UMAW and UMG agree on. 

The uncomfortable reality for Fans First supporters is that Live Nation-Ticketmaster itself would also like to see it pass. In December, CEO Michael Rapino posted a tweet celebrating the bill for “making progress against predatory ticket resale practices.” Ticketmaster’s support for Fans First makes intuitive sense: They would rather sell tickets directly to fans than to middlemen who jack up the prices without kicking anything back to Ticketmaster. But it also creates a bit of a PR conundrum for the bill’s other supporters, many of whom tend to regard the live events juggernaut as an antagonist rather than an ally. NIVA, for instance, which leads the Fix the Tix coalition, has also been outspoken in its support for the federal Department of Justice’s recent antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. 

It’s precisely this PR conundrum that the email from Pascrell’s office aimed to exploit. Though the Fix the Tix coalition is in fact led by NIVA, the email characterizes it as a “a group of industry players, led by the former Ticketmaster CEO [Irving Azoff].” The coalition’s actual connection to Azoff, who served as Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s CEO from 2008 to 2013, is much more tenuous than that: He serves on the advisory board of the Black Music Action Coalition, a group that aims to fight racism in the music industry by advocating for Black artists and songwriters, which is just one of 29 groups that comprise the Fix the Tix coalition—many of which, like NIVA, are vocally in support of breaking up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly. 

The email’s attempt to tie Fix the Tix to Azoff includes a link to an article about the supposed connection on Ticket News, a publication owned by Don Vaccaro, CEO of TicketNetwork, the multi-million-dollar Connecticut scalping company whose employees made significant contributions to Pascrell’s campaigns. According to a 2015 Seattle Times article, Ticket News is a “website purporting to be an industry news-gathering service but serving largely to promote [Vaccaro’s] business interests.” (Neither Vaccaro nor a TicketNetwork spokesperson responded to a request for comment.)

With all this in mind, the email from Pascrell’s legislative director can be read as an attempt by the secondary ticketing industry, speaking through the office of a legislator who has been convinced by its donations and lobbying efforts, to make the nearly industry-wide consensus behind Fans First work in its own favor. It goes back to the King Kong vs. Godzilla dynamic: Because Ticketmaster opposes secondary ticketing, it’s fairly easy to make it seem like any other opposition to it is tantamount to support for Ticketmaster.

The email also makes reference to a number of consumer groups that support Pascrell’s scalper-friendly BOSS and SWIFT Act. Those groups include the National Consumers League, Consumer Federation of America, Sports Fans Coalition, Fan Freedom Project, and Protect Ticket Rights—all of which, as my former colleague Marc Hogan reported in Pitchfork in 2023, are funded, directly or indirectly, by the secondary ticketing industry itself. 

Kevin Erickson, director of the Future of Music Coalition, is an authority on the ways that music industry machinations impact actual musicians, and has been invited to speak to congressional caucuses on the subject multiple times. He has a keen interest in the ticketing industry, and has publicly criticized both Ticketmaster and the secondary sellers. I asked him to explain the relationship between the aforementioned consumer groups and the secondaries, and he described a “strange bedfellows alignment” borne from mutual opposition to the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger in 2009-2010. In the decade and a half since, that alignment has become a force to be reckoned with in the ongoing battles over the ticket industry: Erickson calls it a primary reason why stronger regulations on secondary ticketing—like a price cap or outright ban on reselling tickets from a profit—have been so difficult to achieve in the U.S. compared to in countries like France, Portugal, and Norway, where such measures are already in place. 

In a roundabout way, then, even the secondary market’s contributions to the shitty state of ticketing can perhaps be blamed, at least partially, on the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly. If it weren’t for the hubris of their merger, the secondary sellers and consumer groups would have had less reason to align against them, and if it weren’t for that alignment, Congress might be able to rein in the secondary market. 

Part of the reason the BOSS and SWIFT Act is unlikely to pass is that it was supplanted by the TICKET Act, a bill that passed the House in May, which is clearly an improvement from the perspectives of fans and artists. It doesn’t have BOSS and SWIFT’s ban on price caps for the secondary market, and it would outlaw the use of confusing URLs like JonesBeachAmphitheatre.com.

The TICKET Act isn’t perfect, but then neither is the Fans First Act. Both bills include bans on speculative tickets, with one important exception: Brokers can still sell them as long as they don’t explicitly say that what they’re selling is a “ticket,” but instead call it a service to obtain a ticket for you. One can imagine how this might work in practice: Before you shell out your $200 for a broker to buy a $150 ticket on Ticketmaster and email it to you, you’re clicking a button that says “Get My Seats” or whatever instead of “Buy Tickets”—a marginally more transparent version of the same useless leeching. The existence of this useful loophole may also come down to secondary-industry money. According to Open Secrets, Stan Chia, Vivid Seats’ CEO, maxed out his individual donation last year to Jan Schakowsky, the Democrat who heads the House Consumer Protection subcommittee and co-sponsored the TICKET Act. (Neither Chia nor Schakowsky’s press secretary responded to requests for comment.)

The BOSS and SWIFT Act may be dead in the water, but I think the email is still worth talking about, as much for its tactics of persuasion as its actual policy goals. It would be one thing if Pascrell’s team were openly advocating for the rights of ticket scalpers to go on gouging fans for as much money as they can get. What’s really pernicious, and indicative of larger currents in the ongoing legislative battles over ticketing, is that they were presenting their bill as protecting the interests of fans—and more generally, as being on the side of the little guy in the fight against the Live Nation-Ticketmaster behemoth. 

That line of argument, enabled by the King Kong vs. Godzilla dynamic and the consumer groups that the secondary ticketing industry pays for, has been persuasive to legislators in situations beyond the fights over BOSS and SWIFT itself. Together with the money that secondary industry players have spent on lobbying or channeled directly to lawmakers, it is likely responsible for the fact that the TICKET Act, and even the Fans First Act, don’t include stronger regulations on the secondary market. In other words, tactics like those in the email are partially to blame for the fact that $20,000 Taylor Swift tickets haven’t yet been legislated out of existence.

Hearing Things is dedicated to investigative reporting on the music industry. If you have a story or information you'd like to share, send us an email at tips@hearingthings.co.