By Trichoridist, 7/24/2025 | The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission were directed by President Trump to conduct an investigation into ticket scalping pursuant to Executive Order 14254 “Combating Unfair Practices in the Live Entertainment Market.”
This led directly to both agencies inviting public comments on the state of the live event ticketing market—an industry riddled with speculation, opacity, and middlemen who seem to make money without ever attending a show. Over 4000 artists, fans, economists, state attorneys general, and industry veterans all weighed in. And the record reveals something important particularly regarding resellers: there’s a rising consensus that the resellers are engaged in some really shady practices designed for one purpose–to extract as much money as possible from fans and artists without regard to the damage it does to the entire artist-fan relationship.
Over the next several posts, I’ll be highlighting individual comments submitted to the DOJ/FTC inquiry. Some are technical, some personal, and some blisteringly direct—but all speak to the fundamental imbalance between artists, fans, and the multi-layered resellers, bots, and platforms that profit from both ends of the transaction.
This isn’t just about high prices. It’s about ownership, transparency, control, and accountability and the lenders who fuel the fraud. Many of the commenters argue that ticketing is no longer just a marketplace—it’s a manipulated, closed-loop ecosystem in which the reseller’s house always wins. And for too long, the architects of that system have claimed there’s nothing to see here. There is plenty to see here.
Each post in this series will spotlight one of these submissions that I have selected—not just to amplify the voices that took time to respond, but to help connect the dots on how the ticketing industry got here, who’s benefiting, and what needs to change.
We all have to be grateful to Kid Rock who brought this debacle to President Trump’s attention and to the President himself for making it a priority. We also have to thank Senator Marsha Blackburn for her continued defense of artists through her BOTS Act co-sponsored with Senator Blumenthal. Senator Blackburn has long opposed the use of automated fraudster systems to extract rents from fans and artists and we hope that the DOJ/FTC inquiry will also shed light on why there have been so few prosecutions.
Stay tuned for the first in the series. Spoiler alert: it’s going to be hard to argue that this is a “free market” when fans are bidding against bots and artists are not allowed to control the face value of their own shows.
This is a summary of a lot of the more involved issues that came up in the comments:
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Go here to read the rest of this very informative and educational article:
https://thetrichordist.com/2025/07/
Thanks to COMBO member Rob Roper for submitting this article! https://www.robroper.com