The secondary market has been in the news a lot lately…a lot.
The D.C. RESALE ACT just passed.
StubHub is facing a lawsuit over illegal practices.
The Savannah Bananas kept resale in-house. They saved their fans $13.69M.
No fraud. No black-market boogie man. Just real relationships with fans…sustained and deepened.
Issues are piling up. Laws are being passed.
This isn’t a temporary setback. A passing moment. This is the sign of a structural turning point.
This shouldn’t be a shock…it’s a story that’s been building for years.
The Live Nation trial was a real moment of change.
The discovery emails. The testimony.
Laughing about jacking up parking passes. Casual contempt for fans. Dismissiveness towards artists.
The Velvet Hammer…not a theory, practice.
But pressure had been building long before the Live Nation trial even began.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority investigated viagogo. Ireland created a prohibition on resale of certain events. Brazil making abusive pricing practices illegal.
The Taylor Swift Eras Tour which was overrun with brokers and BOTS.
Just hit after hit. That felt like business as usual…
But now…the flood.
The D.C. RESALE Act. The California Fans First Act. Ontario’s price caps. The UK’s King’s Speech confirming legislative reform.
South Korea’s updated Public Performance Act and the National Sports Promotion Act…called, “the world’s toughest anti-scalper law.”
Germany’s industry calling for 25% resale caps.
The EU’s draft of the Digital Fairness Act.
That’s before we get to StubHub CEO, Eric Baker’s, hedge fund investigation.
The class action lawsuit against StubHub.
And…more and more.
This isn’t just a crackdown on the secondary market. It’s a collapse of the logic that protected the brokers and made the ticket business what it currently is.
As a society, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking, “the market will solve all of our problems.”
Some of us have drunk the Kool-Aid to such an extent that market logic is infallible and the answer to every question is some variation of “free markets.”
But this logic has never been true.
There is no such thing as a free market. Someone always has a thumb on the scale.
Even if a true market could exist…it would move towards a monopoly. I don’t think any of you want less competition.
The market isn’t God.
The market isn’t perfect.
The market, in fact, won’t fix everything. More than likely, it will make things worse…much, much worse.
The problem is systemic.
But the current nature of the secondary market makes it easy for legislators to act against.
Don’t trust. And don’t believe me.
Instead, check the math. And the flimsy justifications the industry makes to defend itself.
The industry’s core defense is that the secondary market provides a service. Liquidity. Access. Savings for fans.
The market works.
Everyone wins.
“Bro, the logic is overwhelming.”
The math says something else entirely.
That’s amazing.
This sounds totally reasonable.
Altruistic.
There’s a number. There’s a source.
Where can I get some of this free money?
The source is an industry report using sales data from Automatiq.
Automatiq prices billions of dollars in tickets. They have data about both sides of the transaction.
This makes the report’s findings not trustworthy.
Why?
Because the report only measured tickets sold below face value. Tickets sold above face value were not included.
That $414 million is 2.3% of the North American secondary ticket market’s $18 billion in gross transaction value in 2024. A number that was pulled from StubHub’s S-1 filing.
In other words, a touch more than a rounding error.
A lot of money, but not in the context of a massive industry.
My people ran the math using third-party data and the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s data.
Assuming a conservative 30% average markup on only half of the above face value sales…fans paid a $2.08 billion premium.
Net that out with the claimed savings and fans are $1.67 billion in the hole.
Consider the sports average markup, 120%, fans are down $4.5 billion.
For every $1 saved on an under face value ticket, fans paid between $5 and $12 dollars extra.
That’s some pretty good ROI if you are on the right side of those numbers.
The bigger issue: one number was left, and one was published.
Lies of omission.
Combine the math with the BOTs, the buying teams, the incognito browsers, and all of the other tools that brokers use to jump the line…it undermines any potential pro-broker arguments that might carry weight.
Because when you combine those two arguments, the secondary market doesn’t become a service…it becomes exploitation, dressed up in lobbyist language.
Legislators aren’t stupid. They may be under-resourced, but they aren’t idiots.
The investigations, the BOT bans, the price caps, the antitrust investigations are not attacks on competition. They are a logical response to evidence that says that the idea of competition was a con.
The math holds up a mirror.
The mirror says, “Not on the level.”
The legislators saw it and acted.
The regulatory wave hitting the secondary market is not an isolated event.
This is a part of a broad, multi-sector rejection of the “markets must be free” and “markets will fix everything” logic that has dominated for decades.
Again…don’t believe me.
Look at the evidence.
The FTC’s Junk Fees Rules force hotels, vacation rentals, and, ticket sellers to disclose all mandatory fees upfront.
California’s Honest Pricing Law makes it illegal to advertise a price without including all mandatory charges.
Maryland banned surveillance pricing. Connecticut followed. New York City is investigating the practice.
New York passed the Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act.
The bipartisan 21st Century Road to Housing Act curbs corporate price gouging by prohibiting private equity firms from buying up homes.
Illinois: hospitals have to publish standard charges for 300 shoppable services.
The FTC cracked down on noncompete agreements.
The EU fined Google nearly $1 billion for breaches of the Digital Markets Act.
State AGs are suing to block the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
I’ve belabored the point to make a point.
This enforcement of consumer protection isn’t a flash in the pan and it isn’t isolated.
It is everywhere.
It is a structural shift.
The free market fallacy is crumbling in real time.
Consumer welfare doesn’t stop because someone wants to go to a show…
It’s all connected.
The question you need to ask is whether you are going to ignore this evidence. Are you going to continue to think that tickets are different?
Legislators aren’t. Fans aren’t.
The team president who sees this regulatory wave and says, “That’s just a secondary market problem” is making a choice.
The CRO who does their math and thinks, “We don’t behave like that” is also making a choice.
The venue operator watching the global crackdown and thinking, “That’ll never reach us” is also making a choice.
The secondary market has become a boom or bust business. Built on the logic of capital, which says everything must be a commodity, extract as much as possible with the fans and the industry being an afterthought.
The resilient business is the one that controls its relationship with its fans.
The commodity business is the one that outsources that relationship or follows the same extractive logic of capital that drives the secondary market.
The evidence of change is everywhere.
You have a choice.
Relationships or extraction.
The answer starts with an honest look at where you stand. I’ve got a free diagnostic for that.
Start there.
You’ve scored your business. Maybe you are in the danger zone.
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