A controversial California Assembly bill that would have forced Ticketmaster to share its ticket inventory with resale sites StubHub and SeatGeek was amended with anti-resale provisions that would allow promoters like Live Nation to bar Stubhub and SeatGeek from sell concert tickets in California.
The legislative whiplash maneuver is the result of the music industry's successful attempt to block the Oakland legislature Buffy Weeksare trying to address longstanding consumer complaints against Ticketmaster by forcing it to significantly water down the law.
The original version of the bill was introduced on April 8, when Wicks held a press conference with the California Consumer Federation and members of several state Chamber of Commerce groups and unveiled a plan, endorsed by StubHub and SeatGeek, to “make the ticket more competitive.” To achieve this, the bill proposed to ban Live Nation's use of exclusive venue contracts, which Wicks said had given the company an unhealthy 80% share of the concert market and had led to skyrocketing prices of tickets since the company's merger with Ticketmaster in 2009. .
Wicks' bill also included a clause — shocking to many in the live entertainment space — that would require Ticketmaster to develop software integrations that would allow rival ticketing companies and ticket resale sites to pull ticket inventory from the Ticketmaster site and sell on their own websites. Wicks said she wanted to create a Kayak.com-style ticket marketplace, where sites like StubHub and SeatGeek, along with smaller mainstream ticketing companies like Dice and Tixr, sold the same concert tickets that Ticketmaster sold.
The proposal was immediately opposed by professional sports teams, including the Golden State Warriors and San Francisco 49ers, along with concert promoters, venue operators, arts groups and a number of live music industry organizations, including the National Independent Venues Association, the Recording Academy and the Coalition of Music Artists. Critics said the bill stripped California venues of their rights to monetize ticketing contracts and transferred the power to control how artists and venues sell tickets to third-party technology companies without any safeguards.
Wicks explained that the bill would help consumers by making ticket companies compete to sell tickets, but opponents said sellers would still have an incentive to raise ticket prices for big concerts when demand greatly exceeds supply. . Others argued that giving resale sites direct access to primary tickets would push more tickets into the hands of scalpers and cause prices to skyrocket.
Booking agent Sam Hunt with Wasserman Music described the bill as problematic during a subcommittee hearing on April 16, warning that it “punished artists” and “created a dangerous system for fans.”
“Artists agree that the ticketing process is deeply flawed,” Hunt said, before adding that the blame lies with “unregulated ticket brokers” and “the secondary platforms that allow them to exist and flourish.”
Facing widespread opposition from the live music industry and many members of the commission, Wicks promised to make changes to the legislation.
On Tuesday (April 24), during a hearing of the House Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, Wicks introduced a new, partially completed bill that would exempt professional and collegiate sports teams from the new rules. More specifically, it included a clause that said it would be an artist's decision “to determine the terms and conditions relating to the sale, pricing, distribution and transportation of tickets for their events.”
This new language, which mirrors legislation in other states as well as proposed federal legislation, has been interpreted to mean that artists will have the right to block resale sites from selling their tickets, potentially ending the resale of concert tickets in California. stark contrast to the original account.
Wicks said the amendment came out of a compromise with other lawmakers and is still being reviewed and amended. Lobbyists for secondary sites such as StubHub and SeatGeek testified that they would withdraw their support for the bill if the new language remained.
Wicks isn't the only politician facing ticketing initiatives. Since the high-profile crash of Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket sales in November 2022, Ticketmaster has come under fire from members of both parties in Congress and is reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department on antitrust charges. State lawmakers across the country have largely tried and failed to pass legislation limiting Ticketmaster's power, but few have struggled and lost as much as Wicks, who initially chose to align her efforts with the secondary ticket market.
Today's live music industry is a diverse cross-section of competing multinationals and independent businesses consisting of venue operators, talent agencies, concert promoters, artists and their managers, and major ticketing companies. The broad group of competing interests doesn't agree on much except their universal opposition to the ticket resale business, which many believe caused Swift's ticket sales to crash. The bot attack that preceded the temporary suspension of the sale had all the hallmarks of similar attacks used by ticket scalping groups.
In its defense, representatives of the secondary ticketing business argue that sites like StubHub and SeatGeek provide a safe marketplace for buying and selling tickets that have been embraced by consumers and copied by Ticketmaster, which runs its own resale business. .
The friction between the music industry and the secondary market includes access to high-demand concerts by artists like Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. Lobbyists for resale sites say Ticketmaster unfairly blocks ticket resellers from accessing high-demand tickets. Ticketmaster officials argue that their artist customers want their tickets sold directly to fans and not marked up on resale sites.
After the introduction of the renewed Wicks bill in California, a new round of debate ensued. During the committee debating the bill, Member of the Assembly Isaac Bryan said Wicks' logic that a Kayak.com site would drive up ticket prices was flawed, noting that with hotels, “There's no secondary market to sell a room for two, three or four” times the amount it had initially paid for the room reservation.
Assembly member Lori Wilson added that Wicks should focus its efforts on determining whether Ticketmaster had a competitive or unfair advantage. Committee President Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said lawmakers needed to focus on putting consumers first, adding: “We as a committee don't necessarily think the biggest problem is the monopoly on the front end but the brokers in the middle who buy the tickets and drive a lot of the problems.” at the market.
Despite these reservations, the new, radically different legislation will go ahead. After a brief vote, the revised bill passed the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee and now heads to the Appropriations Committee, where Wicks serves as chairman.
