Facing the Music: How States Are Fighting Concert Ticket Scalpers

Confirmation following ticket purchase for the Noah Kahan: The Great Divide Tour.

It is no secret that concert tickets have become increasingly hard to secure. While traveling over February break, I listened to Noah Kahan in the airport after trying, and failing, to get tickets to see him live at Citifield in July. With the busy Presidents Day weekend travel trends, I wondered why my seat on the plane was any different from those seats in the stands. 

Airlines don’t allow flyers to purchase tickets and resell them for profit, and concert venues should not either. The ticketing practice I am referring to is scalping, or the strategy of buying tickets to resell them for profit. Non-transferable plane tickets limit security complications, but mainly allow for airlines to adjust their pricing based on surges in demand and last-minute bookings. Without facing similar restrictions in the entertainment industry, scalping costs fans, artists, and venues for the reseller’s gain.

Artists have been particularly vocal in response to fan frustration with overly exclusive events. Olivia Dean, this year’s Grammy Award winner for Best New Artist, spoke explicitly about how inflated resale prices impact her upcoming The Art of Loving Live Tour. Dean wrote to Ticketmaster, the ticketing platform used for her events, on social media, “The prices at which you’re allowing tickets to be resold are vile and completely against our wishes.” Ticketmaster has since disabled the resale feature for the events and took to Instagram to insist “we support artists’ ability to set the terms of how their tickets are sold and resold.”

Some artists have tried to work with Ticketmaster themselves to keep scalpers out of their events. In 2024, Grammy Award nominee Chappell Roan cancelled tickets purchased by scalpers and re-released them to fans through a request system for her sold-out show in Tennessee. In Chicago and New York State, however, ticket transferability restrictions make these strategies illegal.

Overseas, scalpers employ similar tactics, but face new challenges. Last year, the UK banned scalping entirely with widespread support from popular musicians including Dua Lipa and Coldplay. In response, Live Nation insisted, “Ticketmaster already limits all resale in the UK to face value prices, and this is another major step forward for fans—cracking down on exploitative touting to help keep live events accessible” and “encourage others around the world to adopt similar fan-first policies.”

American policymakers should take the company at its word. Even with recent efforts by artists to fight scalpers, existing U.S. strategies to keep ticket prices down and in the hands of actual fans have proven insufficient. In 2016, Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act to fight resale tactics that allowed scalpers to beat individual fans to large numbers of tickets by imposing civil penalties on violators. Since the policy’s enactment, however, there has been only one instance of enforcement. In September of 2025, the Federal Trade Commission sued Ticketmaster for facilitating markups in resale prices that resulted in a $3.7 billion gain for the platform and its parent company, Live Nation, from 2019 to 2024.  

Certain economists disagree, arguing that inflated ticket prices merely reflect the consequences of a free market when ticket demand is high and supply is limited. The willingness to pay above face value keeps scalping alive. What these perspectives might not account for is how this unnecessary secondary market takes from artists and venues. Artists and venues don’t see the profits made from scalped tickets. Instead, these key stakeholders only receive the revenue generated from the original ticket sale for their performance. 

With federal policy solutions falling short and artists and concertgoers continuing to jump hurdles to navigate inflated ticket prices, some states are trying to fight the problem themselves. New York State Senator James Skoufis announced plans to end scalping in New York State by restricting resale prices to be no more than the face value of a ticket. The effort comes before the current ticketing rules expire in July. New York is not alone in these efforts. The week before, California legislators proposed similar legislation that would place a maximum on resale prices for 10% of the face value of the original ticket. 

With new policy strategies to expand ticket accessibility for fans at the state level, scalpers might soon face the music. Live music connects fans with artists across venues, state lines, and international borders. The recent state efforts represent only a piece of the larger role policymakers take around the world in connecting artists and listeners. As an avid Noah Kahan listener, I propose that state policymakers embrace this “New Perspective” on targeting scalping to expand concert accessibility effectively.