This One Weird Email Helps Explain the Horrible State of Concert Ticketing
On the secondary market, tickets are now going for as much as $20,000. Why hasn’t the government stepped in?
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.
