Trump Crackdown on Ticket Brokers Will Make Concert Seats Tougher To Find

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Hot ticket: President Trump on Monday issued an executive order cracking down on ticket brokers.

“Consumers will be better off if we deregulated scalping, let the market function.”—Then-New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, quoted in the New York Times, April 22, 2001.

“America’s live concert and entertainment industry is the envy of the world. But it has become blighted by unscrupulous middlemen who sit at the intersection between artists and fans and impose egregious fees while providing minimal value. Ticket scalpers use bots and other unfair means to acquire large quantities of face-value tickets and then re-sell them at an enormous markup on the secondary market, price-gouging consumers and depriving fans of the opportunity to see their favorite artists without incurring extraordinary expenses.”— President Trump, executive order Combating Unfair Practices in the Live Entertainment Market, March 31, 2025.

President Trump campaigned promising deregulation. But here he is imposing new regulation on “unscrupulous middlemen,” “egregious fees,” and what he describes as “price-gouging.” Even Eliot Spitzer, the Democrat from New York who was famously aggressive as attorney general, took a more free-market approach.

Maybe Trump missed class at the Wharton School on the day this was covered, but what he derides as “middlemen” serve an important function in capitalism. If consumers find a fee or price to be enormous, egregious, or extraordinary, no one is forcing them to pay it. They can stay home, or buy a ticket to a less expensive show. Or they can start their own ticket-broker business offering lower fees. Ticket brokers, like most middlemen, provide a service. They help people who have money but not the time, luck, patience, advance-planning ability, or tech savvy to navigate whatever direct sales system—wait outside on a sidewalk overnight for a wristband, get online and constantly refresh—a venue has devised. And they help people who have the time, luck, patience, advance-planning ability, or tech savvy monetize those abilities. Allowing the price mechanism to function freely lets the scarce good—a concert or sporting event ticket—go to the person who values it most.

Variable pricing is helping to maximize profits and better match supply and demand all over the economy, in sectors from hotel rooms to Uber rides. The technology allows a Red Sox season ticket holder to make their seat available for resale on an app like Stubhub or Gameday if they have a last-minute family emergency, or if the weather turns out unexpectedly cold or damp. That makes it easier for the team to fill seats that would otherwise go unfilled, and it makes it easier for fans to make a last-minute decision to head for the ballpark. Focusing only on the super-high prices—say, the seventh game of a World Series—overlooks the substantial benefits of resale markets for games that are in lesser demand.

The most sophisticated and popular performers—Taylor Swift, for example—have gotten highly sophisticated at using technology and direct relationships with fans to capture a profit-maximizing price. None of the players in this industry—the performers, the producers, the concert venues, the ticket buyers, the brokers—were born yesterday. Brokers who buy a lot of tickets early on at face value transfer some of the attendance risk away from the producers and also provide capital.

Congress might conceivably claim a Constitutional role here via the interstate commerce clause in cases of ticket sales across state lines, but as a presidential priority, this is beyond a stretch. If Trump wants to take on ticket pricing, he now has control of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and he’s also able to mount concerts on the Mall in Washington or other federal lands. Let him try. But unleashing the enforcement powers of the federal government against ticket brokers, like any government intervention in market pricing and free trade, will only make it harder to find good seats.