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Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) proved last week why he remains one of the most awesome Republican senators, and completely justified my vote for him in November.
During a Senate Judiciary hearing on Taylor Swift concert tickets – which, by the way, is probably the best way to start the year in the Senate – Kennedy basically solved the world’s entire concert ticketing problem in just a couple of minutes of questioning.
If you want to keep ticket prices down, Kennedy argues, you need to ban or limit ticket resale. This eliminates the entire point of using bots (or old-fashioned scalpers) on a ticketing site to buy up tickets at normal prices, and then reselling them at insanely high prices on platforms whose entire business model appears predicated on exactly that. I find it pretty funny that the CEO of SeatGeek was squirming so awkwardly during Kennedy’s whole line of questioning. Why is that?
Put simply, SeatGeek would go out of business tomorrow if a ban were instituted on selling exorbitantly priced secondary market tickets.
Now, it is worth noting that different ticketing companies, including AEG Presents and Live Nation (AKA Ticketmaster—the big name in the headlines that prompted this hearing), allow artists themselves to place a ban on reselling tickets, as well as a hard ceiling on ticket prices. Country star Zach Bryan, for example, caps his tickets at $130 and bans the reselling of those tickets at more than face value. He does that through AEG’s AXS service. Pearl Jam, for its part, uses Ticketmaster whose service allows the band to “limit ticket resales to face value using a Ticketmaster face-value exchange system.”
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So apparently, we don’t even necessarily need the government to get involved here, if we agree this whole situation desperately needs to be solved in the first place. It turns out that if artists want to prevent Taylor Swift-like disasters from happening, those tools already exist.
Which, to be honest, seems to be Kennedy’s point. Why are we even at this point where Congress has to step in? If you want to benefit the consumers, and get them to continue being your customers, you should want to make the process as painless and affordable as possible. Congress is getting involved, however, because these companies couldn’t even do that.
Knowing that, your mileage may vary as to whether this gif is inadvertently more accurate than all of us have been thinking since it first appeared.
But one thing seems to be clear: Kennedy, or at least his thinking, looks like the solution here.
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