Exorbitant ticket resale prices have dominated news headlines about recent live music and sports events, including Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, the FIFA World Cup, and the 2026 NBA playoffs–with even upper deck seats in massive arenas listed on ticket broker sites for hundreds or thousands of dollars over face value. But it’s not just major cultural events: tickets for many concerts and games are scooped up en masse purely for the purpose of reselling on platforms like Ticketmaster, StubHub, and SeatGeek, dramatically inflating the cost for Americans hoping to catch a show or game. A new white paper released by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator (VPA), located in one of America’s great music cities, calculates corporate resellers and online ticketing platforms are inflating the cost of live events by $11 billion every year, and recommends policy solutions to make entertainment more affordable and accessible to American families.
“Platforms that were originally created to allow people to sell tickets they didn’t want have morphed into massive operations that do little but encourage corporate middlemen to snap up as many tickets as possible for the sole purpose of reselling at a higher price,” said author Brian Shearer, Director of Competition and Regulatory Policy at VPA. “Corporate resellers and online ticketing platforms inflate the cost of live events by $11 billion annually, and policymakers should take action to put an end to ticket profiteering.”
Most people purchase tickets for live entertainment online using either the primary online ticketing platforms that have deals with venues to sell tickets–an industry that is dominated by Ticketmaster–or the secondary online ticketing platforms that facilitate resales, which includes StubHub and SeatGeek, alongside Ticketmaster. These platforms, which have existed for decades, are frequently criticized for charging service fees of 20 to 40% of the face value of a ticket.
Almost immediately after the resale platforms were created, resellers took advantage of the arbitrage opportunity by purchasing large volumes of tickets off the primary platforms and selling them at a substantial markup on the secondary platforms. In recent years, the professional large-scale reseller industry has grown. What was once a fly-by-night industry has become dominated by large corporate enterprises with ties to Wall Street. A recent class-action lawsuit alleges that the CEO of StubHub owns a hedge fund that buys and sells massive amounts of tickets on the platform.
The report explains that this problem has become more than a nuisance: corporate platforms are adding significant cost to the price of seeing a live show or game, much of which is simply unnecessary price-gouging. With online ticket platform fees reaching $13.6 billion, Shearer’s analysis calculates that $6.8 billion of that is excess, with resellers adding an additional $4.5 billion—for a total of more than $11 billion in excess fees.
One solution gaining steam globally and, increasingly, across the U.S., is to cap the price of resold tickets at face value and cap online ticket platform fees at 10%. Indeed, Ireland, France, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Japan, Turkey, Brazil, Hong Kong, Poland, and Portugal all ban resale above face value, and many also cap platform fees. The Canadian province of Ontario recently followed in these countries’ footsteps. The United Kingdom is considering a ban on ticket resale above face value and a 10% cap on platform service charges. Rhode Island has already passed these exact policies. Multiple states, including Vermont, Maine, and Washington, D.C., have taken similar action. The music industry itself, including big-name acts like Pearl Jam, Kid Rock, Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Radiohead, and Noah Kahan, as well as representatives of music venues, have all expressed support for similar policies.
The report includes sample legislative language that policymakers can use to rein in ticket profiteering and lays out a theory that state Attorneys General and the Federal Trade Commission could use to crack down on these practices without new legislation.
Read the white paper here, or read more about the report on VPA’s Substack.
About the VPA
The Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA) focuses on cutting-edge topics in political economy and regulation to swiftly bring research, education, and policy proposals from infancy to maturity. To learn more about our work, visit vu.edu/vpa.