Tag: Speculative ticketing

Kid Rock Takes the Hill: What the Senate’s Ticketing Hearing Really Signals

On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy will convene a hearing titled “Examining the Impact of Ticket Sales Practices and Bot Resales on Concert Fans.” At the center of the witness list is Kid Rock who bridges fan frustration, executive action, and emerging legislative priorities.

From the Oval Office to the Senate Hearing Room

The dysfunction in the U.S. ticketing market has rarely been stated more plainly than in the Oval Office on March 31, 2025, when President Trump signed an Executive Order targeting scalping and speculative ticket abuse. Standing alongside him, Kid Rock articulated what millions of fans and artists already felt: “I think this is a great first step…. I would love down the road if there’d be legislation that we could actually put a cap on the resale of tickets.”

President Trump captured the broken social contract in stark terms: “I see the artists… they go out with a $100 ticket, and it sells for $2,000 the following night.” His emphasis was not merely about price, but about the erosion of the artist-fan bond: “Bob is more interested in the fans and the people that are having to pay crazy prices.”

That moment matters now because it set a policy through-line: unchecked resale markets and bot-driven harvesting have turned access to live events into a rigged system. The Senate hearing is where that narrative meets legislative scrutiny.

A Broader Landscape: States Taking Ticketing Reform into Their Own Hands

While Congress now faces the issue nationally, state lawmakers haven’t waited. A growing number of states have responded to speculative ticketing and resale abuses with enforceable reforms.

Most recently, the California legislature took up AB 1349, which goes further than many prior state laws by empowering local authorities with enforceable tools to govern resale practices, ticket transparency, and anti-scalping enforcement at the local level. The bill reflects the emerging view that ticketing dysfunction is not just a pricing problem—it’s a governance gap that undermines the free market, local cultural economies and consumer trust. (California AB 1349 and the Case for Enforceable Local Ticketing Reform.)

These state experiments matter because they show how legislative remedies—if properly structured—can move beyond symbolic rhetoric to real market impact by regulating resellers like StubHub. They also heighten the stakes for federal action: if states can innovate meaningful protections, why shouldn’t the national marketplace?

The Witnesses and What They Represent

Kid Rock’s testimony brings the artist-fan perspective directly into the policy forum—where ticketing has often been treated as a narrow consumer pricing issue, rather than a systemic failure of market design.

The hearing also includes testimony from policy analysts and independent venue advocates. These voices underscore two critical points:

  • All-in pricing alone isn’t sufficient if speculative trading, bots, and opaque distribution channels continue to dominate.
  • Smaller venues and promoters lack the leverage and infrastructure to safeguard fair access, meaning reform must account for market structure, not just disclosure.

Together, the witnesses frame the issue as one not only about price, but about who gets to participate in culture on fair terms.

A Moment of Reckoning for Ticketing Policy

This hearing isn’t just another Congressional event—it’s the logical next step in a policy arc that runs from state legislatures, to executive recognition, to national scrutiny. The message is the system as it exists today privileges speculation over connection, and intermediaries over communities.

Whether the Senate responds with binding reforms or more symbolic gestures will determine whether this hearing marks a genuine inflection point but President Trump has made his policy clear and Kid Rock can tell you all about it.

@SenAnaliseOrtiz: StubHub is Blatantly Allowing Illegal Speculative Ticketing Sales

https://twitter.com/SenAnaliseOrtiz/status/1864000231894822995

As we discussed on the Artist Rights Symposium ticketing panel, it’s blatant, it’s pervasive, and it’s not just Arizona… No way StubHub should be allowed access to the public IPO markets until they clean up their act. Of course, if they clean up their act, they will have to recast their earnings…

Chronology: The Week in Review: Are Speculative Tickets Already Illegal? Daniel Ek tries to pass himself off as a man of the people; What is Spotify’s contractual basis for their modernized free goods program?

Speculative ticketing is the practice of selling an option to maybe buy a popular ticket (often at an insane price) before the ticket goes on sale. You may not realize you are not buying a real ticket, although these tickets often come with fine print, and as Tom Waits tells us, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

There is an effort going on to specifically ban speculative ticketing at the state level which I applaud as I think speculative ticketing should be a crime. One reason I think this is because I think it already is a crime in most if not all states and possibly under federal law as well.

Think about it–do you think that if you before Blackstone and said to Sir William, My Lord, the defendant sold me a famous cow he didn’t own at a price he invented and promised to deliver the cow on law day. He took my money but delivered no cow (or delivered a different and unfamous cow). And the defendant said, perfectly legal My Lord.

What do you think My Lord Blackstone would say?

What would Billy do?

I don’t think the English common law would have just let the defendant walk out without at least compensating the buyer. Therefore, there’s probably a case that can be made out of existing law for selling stolen or counterfeit goods, or a host of other common law derivatives that would violate the charter of the land.

So as we try to get specific legal action to deal with speculative tickets, let’s not allow the lobbyists for Stubhub to negotiate the punishment that they want rather than the punishment that already applies under existing state civil or criminal law.

Ek’s New Iconography: Will the real Daniel Ek please stand up?

MTP readers will no doubt remember when Daniel Ek refused to be deposed in the latest Nashville case against Spotify for copyright infringement (Eight Mile Style). He eventually was deposed where he tried to say that he had no first hand knowledge of the facts or publishing practices at Spotify. Others did that for him after they got finished peeling his pears.

Ryan Hogg, writing in Fortune, published what I can only think is a puff piece on Ek trying to pass him off as a man of the people with a management style of just one of the team. Worth over a billion dollars and controlling voting stock.

And then there’s this:

What is Spotify’s contractual basis for their modernized free goods program?

There’s been a lot of discussion about Spotify’s new “modernized” free goods program aka Track Monetization Eligibility. It does raise the question of how they are getting away with this. Free goods, after all, were based on contract terms that the artist got to negotiate (and which, by the way, was passed along to songwriters through the artist’s controlled compositions clause for anyone not on a pure statutory rate and still is.

Who agreed to this? And why aren’t they stepping forward to claim their genius?