Ticket resellers need watchdogs, too

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal has recently re-upped his focus on the issue of live event ticketing and pricing, issuing a subpoena to Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster (big names in the space) following months of negative news coverage surrounding the pricing of tickets for the Taylor Swift “Eras” Tour.

But while Blumenthal concentrates his — and the U.S. Senate’s — attention on the original sellers of tickets, his constituents like me are dealing with apparent ongoing flouting of a new Connecticut law focused on ensuring ticket price transparency. This is occurring at the hands of ticket resellers — the people who actually jacked Swift tickets up to those five-figure amounts you’ve heard about — and who do not seem to be getting much attention from policymakers in Washington, D.C. — and perhaps also not with those focused on enforcing Connecticut’s laws here at home.

Earlier this month, our family bought tickets to the Harlem Globetrotters show taking place on Dec. 30 in Bridgeport. The tickets were available through StubHub — and, full disclosure, I’m glad they were. What I am less glad about is that StubHub’s website indicated the ticket price was less than $70 each, but that display price did not include fees which, for four tickets, totaled $84.87, according to our receipt. This meant the cost of each ticket was in fact closer to $87 — so $17 in what President Biden might call “junk fees” were not disclosed upfront.

Blumenthal should care about this because Connecticut has a ticket transparency law. He and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong touted it in August this year, a few months before it went into effect.

To be clear, it was in effect when our family started looking for tickets, and when we bought the tickets. According to CT Insider, “The bill will require any provider that ‘facilitates ticket sales or resales’ to provide the total ticket price up front in a ‘clear and conspicuous manner,’ including all service charges. The full price must be shown on the ticket listing before the buyer selects the ticket to purchase.”

This is not what StubHub did with our tickets — many pages were clicked through before we saw the ultimate price of about $87 per ticket. We still bought, because we wanted to see the Globetrotters. But coming out of a period of high inflation when Americans across the country — even here in wealthy Fairfield County — are trying to exercise even more good stewardship of their hard-earned money, an extra $20 here or there that you didn’t realize you needed to spend upfront does matter to people.

And even if it didn’t, the fact is that it appears that a major ticket reseller is out of compliance with Connecticut law, the situation is reportedly occurring in other states with ticket transparency laws such as Tennessee, and that doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention — even though Blumenthal was happy to tout the law ahead of it coming into effect.

Blumenthal, of course, is no longer a state official — though Attorney General Tong is, and presumably he is in a position to have one of his staff perform some searches on ticket reselling sites to see what is happening with pricing for Connecticut events and how broad and deep this problem may run, months after the law he and Blumenthal touted took effect.

But Blumenthal is a federal official, and notably he is currently not a sponsor of the TICKET Act, sponsored by his Democratic colleague Maria Cantwell. That legislation has bipartisan support and it is designed to introduce transparency with regard to ticket prices and fees on a federal, not state, basis. It is hard to fathom why, if he is genuinely concerned about junk fees and event pricing, he has not signed onto this bill which, given his support for Connecticut’s own ticket fee transparency law, seems like an easy-topass no-brainer.

If elected officials want to be serious about addressing live event ticketing issues, they need to look beyond obvious moves that will get them quick-hit favorable news coverage and actually address underlying issues. If fee transparency is in fact a winning political issue, there’s no reason not to dive in and pursue it wholeheartedly — at the state and federal level.