Pascrell Praises Historic Biden Platform Targeting Ticket Fees

White House Competition Council recommends policies long included in Pascrell authored ticket reform measure

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09) today praised the plan laid out by President Joe Biden demanding consumer protection reforms to help eliminate the onerous fees levied against Americans who buy tickets for live concert and sporting events. President Biden is expected to meet with his Competition Council later today and urge Congress to act now to require ticket fees and holdbacks to be disclosed through legislation.

“Today President Biden announces one of the most consumer-friendly platforms ever uttered by an American leader,” said Rep. Pascrell. “Modern life has become frustrating for so many Americans as they face a seemingly endless line of bills and hidden fees seeking to lighten our pockets. The surprise fees leveled at fans and keeping fans in the dark about ticket holdbacks for live events epitomizes that hostility to regular Americans. For decades, American fans have cried out for help, cried out for regulation of a marketplace that has become more larcenous than a Wild West saloon. This is something all Americans, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents agree on: fees are strangling Americans and at long last they must be stopped. President Biden supporting our cause the week after industry reforms were also demanded by a bipartisan Senate panel proves that the time for action is now. We can institute many of these reforms by enacting my BOSS ACT, longstanding legislation I’ve put forward to reform the ticketing marketplace.”

On March 22, 2022, Rep. Pascrell wrote to the heads of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division urging them to overhaul federal guidelines to make it easier to overturn bad mergers. As part of the agencies’ joint inquiry into modernizing merger regulations, Pascrell flagged the Live Nation-Ticketmaster as a “posterchild of consolidation gone bad” and urged its dissolution.

Pascrell has been a leader in Congress calling for regulation of the opaque live events ticket market. Pascrell was an early critic of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, and repeatedly urged the Obama administration to reject it, warning that the union would crush competition and harm consumers. In May 2018, Pascrell wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on his attempts to impose greater positive regulation on the broken live events ticket market.

Two months later, Reps. Pascrell and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ-06) wrote a letter to then-Federal Trade Commission chairman Joseph Simons highlighting a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study which found a myriad of consumer protection and competition issues in the primary and secondary live event ticket markets. The GAO report was commissioned in response to Pallone and Pascrell’s work, and the members urged Simons to do more to protect consumers in the marketplace. In response, the FTC organized a workshop on event tickets held in June 2019 to review many of the challenges faced by ticket-buying fans. At this workshop, every ticket selling platform publicly agreed that they would support a law mandating “all-in” ticket prices. Pascrell attended a House Energy and Commerce Committee oversight hearing in early 2020 on the lack of transparency in the ticket marketplace.

For several Congresses, Pascrell has been the principal sponsor of the BOSS Act, overarching legislation that would impose a basic level of transparency upon the ticket industry so fans have a fair chance to purchase tickets on the primary market and also seeks to protect consumers who choose to use the secondary market to purchase tickets. Pascrell is working to reintroduce the legislation this year. A full section-by-section breakdown of a prior version of the BOSS Act is available here.

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