Fight for Your Rights as a Fan
You deserve rights when buying tickets to your favorite concert, show, or sports game.
The Ticket Buyer Bill of Rights is a set of principles the nation’s leading consumer advocacy groups and others believe should serve as a framework for ticketing legislation that can improve the live events ticketing market that serves millions of fans each year. The Bill of Rights features five pillars:
The Right to Transferability, where ticketholders decide how to use, sell or give away their tickets if they wish and not the entity that previously sold the tickets;
The Right to Transparency, which includes all-in pricing and disclosures of relevant information for the purchasing decision;
The Right to Set the Price, so that companies who originally sold the tickets cannot dictate to fans for what price they can or cannot resell their purchased tickets, and, lastly;
The Right to a Fair Marketplace, where fans compete with actual humans, not illegal software bots, for tickets.
The Right to Recourse, where harmed fans retain the choice to seek remedies through the public court system and are not blocked by terms and conditions that force them into private arbitration.
Right to Transferability
Fans have the right to transfer their tickets freely and without restrictions, especially those imposed by monopolists in the primary industry seeking to restrict transfer to “double dip” on their customers. We believe once you buy your ticket, it’s yours to do with as you please.
Fans need to make informed purchasing decisions, and that’s not possible in a market as opaque as live event ticketing.
Fans should know how much a ticket costs from the first, advertised listing price, not after clicking through several screens.
Fans should be told whether the seller currently has the ticket being sold or not. These disclosures should be clear and conspicuous.
Fans deserve to know how many tickets are actually available for purchase.
Right to Transparency
Right to Set the Price
Price floors and price caps set by primary sellers only restrict consumer choice and harm fans. Primary sellers shouldn’t be allowed to tell fans what tickets can cost if a fan needs to resell a ticket. Doing so only leaves more seats empty come show time.
Fans shouldn’t have to compete with computer software designed to scoop up tickets. Thankfully, federal law already prohibits the use of bots. However, the law has only been enforced once. Companies should be required to report any bot behavior they catch to law enforcement.
Right to a Fair Marketplace
Right to Recourse
Ticket buyers must be assured of their right to access remedies through the public court system when they are deceived, defrauded, or otherwise harmed by sellers in the marketplace. Ticket sellers use terms and conditions that remove critical legal protections. These restrictive terms include predispute arbitration clauses and provisions that block ticket buyers from banding together to seek redress and to address systemic and widespread harm. These restrictions must be banned from all fine-print language that accompanies ticket purchases and other fan-seller interactions in the ticketing marketplace.
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