Does what happened in D.C. stay in D.C.?

Yesterday, February 26, 2020 there was yet another ticket hearing on Capitol Hill. Congress is looking into whether the ways in which live event tickets are sold disadvantage consumers. The answer is not complex. It’s yes.

There to be questioned were representatives from six big ticketing companies: Ticketmaster, AXS, StubHub, Vivid Seats, Tickets.com and TicketNetwork. These companies didn’t send their flacks, they sent their assassins.

I watched the entire hearing on the live stream, having learned my lesson the hard way attending the FTC hearings last year. Here’s my quick takeaway:

We will see a concerted effort to require everyone selling tickets to disclose the all-in final sales price early in the transaction. We are in the final days of either a surprise add on fee at the last point before checkout or the artificially suppressed list price followed by an extraordinary large add on fee at check-out.

We will also see an effort to restrain speculative ticket sales. These are the tickets listed by people who neither own them nor have any sort of an arrangement in place which entitles them to acquire the tickets listed.