Four Ways The NY Attorney General Wants To Change Ticketing

Schneiderman on Thursday in Buffalo will receive the details of a three-year investigation that alleges widespread abuse in the ticket industry, claiming that the practices prevented NY consumers from buying tickets at affordable prices.

The price floor requires that tickets can not be sold for less than face value.

The situation is compounded by fees added to ticket sales by companies such as events giant Ticketmaster, which can add more than 20 percent to the face price of the tickets, Schneiderman said. “This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry”. New York’s attorney general says that’s probably because more than half of tickets to many events are held for industry insiders or otherwise unavailable to the general public. The use of bots to buy tickets remains illegal in NY, though hackers have found ways to routinely circumvent the security measures on sites like TicketMaster.

Despite the seemingly endless fodder for legal action, the AG’s office only announced two enforcement actions with today’s report: $80,000 and $65,000 settlements with unlicensed ticket resellers.

Schneiderman is looking into ticketing fees, too.

And most tickets to major events are never even offered to the general public in the first place, according to Schneiderman’s report.

Had a hard time getting a ticket to a concert or sporting event?

Among other things, the report recommended increased regulation of the ticketing industry, such as brokers providing their ny license numbers as a condition of using resale platforms, promoters disclosing number of seats held and finding technological solutions to address ticket bots.

The report drew attention to the increasing imposition of resale price floors, which fixes the bottom line for ticket prices.

Bots are purchasing concert tickets in NY at an extremely high rate, but the practice is illegal. Unlike paper tickets and electronic tickets that are freely transferrable from the buyer to another person, non-transferrable paperless tickets require an event attendee to present the credit card that was used to purchase the ticket.

“When local music lovers have to spend so much on one concert, it leaves that much less money to spend on local music, theater, and entertainment – and that can hurt our local cultural economy” said Tod A. Kniazuk, Executive Director of Arts Services Initiative of Western New York.

The league encourages people with tickets to sell to do so on the NFL Ticket Exchange, a marketplace operated by Ticketmaster.