#27 - All-In Ticketing Exposed: A Candid Conversation with Randy Nichols

[MUSIC] All right, Randy, thank you so much for jumping on lots of juicy topics to talk about. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm always excited to share my opinions and just kind of talk trash on this crazy world we're living in right now. Yeah, so I think that you got on my radar through your words that mine, but your shit talking on LinkedIn. I can't something along those lines. You're very active on LinkedIn. I love what you have to say on there, but tell us about yourself. Who are you, your involvement with Nito? Why do you care about all this stuff? What's your day job? Let me hear the whole deal. Yeah, totally. So I'm going to start with just the shit talking and I'll go backwards for who I am. So I've been in the business a long time, which I'll explain, but I've found that LinkedIn is just a great way to share opinions about the industry and discuss in a professional fashion, just interesting aspects of our world, that it's open me up to get to know a lot of people where on other social platforms, it pretty quickly devolves to personal attacks and everything else. Where I'm LinkedIn, I feel like people are way more open to be challenged and questioned and enjoy the deeper digging on an issue. So an issue that I've been passionate about is ticketing and there's so many opinions, there's so many potential solutions and problems, that it's a great avenue to have really intelligent conversations where I've gotten to know people like you and I've gotten to know the stakeholders in every major ticketing company it seems, you know, from the CEOs downward and I've learned a ton and it's just given me a platform to fight for things that are important to myself for both fans and artists and you know, most recently it's brought me to meetings with the Department of Justice and the FTC, pop senators offices, it's given me an ability to reach so many people to fight for what's important. So I know you asked me about myself but I just kind of wanted to. Yeah, it's a great place to start and we're going to get into all those topics later and it's literally why we're talking but yeah, you're also highly involved in just like kind of the day-to-day music industry and you know, you and I were talking about this, like you know, as a CEO of prison, I could just duck my head into like code all day long but like as I've you know, as I've been in the industry long and longer, I've realized it's like very important to understand what's happening on the industry and like what's the top, you know, most interesting conversations and why it's important to both like, you know, do your day job really well but also understand like what's in fact in the greater industry and you know, that was a beautiful part of the conversation that we had when we agreed to do the pod. So I'm glad you touched on that first but why don't we yeah, what is your day job and you know, what's your involvement in Nito? Let's bring it back down to our job. Yeah, absolutely. So taking a step back, I started my career as an agent and did that for a handful of years, transition to working for some music. Was it a company called the Artist in Audience where they're no longer around but they were a really cool boutique agency in the mid 90s where I at one time was the assistant for Ken from English, Stan Kirby and Tim Boer all at once for a whole, you know, very successful agents on their own now but they had all just recently become agents and you know, I was sitting in an office and during off offers into a computer until 9 p.m. at night every night where these things were, you know, handwritten offers before we had great systems like prism where like literally, you know, we had one email address for the office and it was just another euro but I got to learn the booking world from the ground up from doing that and I went from intern to agent in probably like a little more than 12 months. So it was kind of kind of a really interesting time. Funny little side note that I know some listeners will appreciate as I've done a few internships in the music industry and I was like, I really need to learn a booking agency. I haven't done this yet. So this is again, pre-internet. So I opened up the pole star guide to booking agencies and I looked through artist rosters of all these companies and my goal was to target agencies that had great bands that I thought were going to break and they were going to need to staff up the companies and my plan literally worked flawlessly. And artist and audience was booking at the time bands like live, tricky, nine inch nails, Marilyn Manson, like so many things that were just blowing up in that mid 90s era and like the moment school ended I immediately rolled into a job and you know, it was a job that they created because they needed to scale up and grow their team. So I was just, you know, little tool of the trade of just finding unique ways to get yourself a job as always. You know, I always find those stories interesting from other people. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So started there as an agent and a company blew up did incredibly well. Guy named Alex Cochin was an amazing agent who started the company but he was not great at running a company but he was a great agent and as fast as a company kind of grew it collapsed unfortunately equally as fast and then I kind of moved on to a few other roles in the industry but it really gave me my knowledge of the live touring industry and in a really strong fashion just being a part of an agency for three or four years. Got it, got it. And then and where does that leave you in like how many years ago was that and what have you been up to since then? Yeah, so that was I've been doing this a long time. That was like the late 90s and I went from there to work for record label for a minute doing tour marketing which was a logical kind of transition from booking. I really just, you know, interestingly I kind of was shining away from booking because at that point in time a company named SFX which has now become live nation was out buying up all the promoters and my fear was as you were going to need less agents because you were going to have these, you know, this huge company that controlled the industry and you know they might just go straight to managers they might not need agents anymore and decided as I was stilt at the very bottom that you know as there could be consolidation that might be a good time to pivot and try something new. And you know it was dead wrong on that, you know, we're not all right on everything but I was right that you know that company would become live nation and become a behemoth and you know they they did kind of carve off you don't have the agents for the top acts, you know, quite often anymore but the middle would have been just fine and continue working in so I was a little often my theories but but not terribly and after that I went and worked for wine to records, tour marketing, worked on everything but the band creed there kind of what in there as creed was blowing up and spent a couple of years there and then I left that just really wasn't happy with the role there just wasn't what I love doing and I ended up in the late 90s working for music tech startup called Music Vision and we were building an ad network from Music websites and we were probably like 20 years too early like a great idea I was employing number 13 company scaled up to about 550 people we had an amazing run but in the dot com bust of what was it 2000 2001 whatever that was the company did not make it through that stock market crash yeah but the company was run by someone that you may know Matt some of the listeners definitely will a guy named Mark Weiss who went on to start artist arena and now has a ticketing VIP company called 24/7 so you know we stayed in touch with the guy who ran the company and worked with him on various projects over the years since then but yeah from that point after I worked at the internet startup I came back to the music industry and worked for a London Sire records for split second then Warner more or less shut down that label and then 9/11 hit and I could not find a job it was impossible to look for work in New York it was just a very weird unique time here and kind of was forced into starting a management company with a friend because I saw no other option and I've been a manager ever since but I literally did not necessarily want to become a manager wasn't looking to be one but just had people tell me to be a manager and the opportunity appeared and 20 something years later I'm still managing wow awesome love that and when did you get involved with needo so I got involved with needo during the during I'm a COVID pandemic. I kind of very quickly realized obviously that we had major probably store industry like everyone else did, but sent time trying to find solutions too. And there was two things that I was very active in. One was learning about every government program available to help support people during COVID. So I ended up on a lot of calls with other managers and agents talking to them how to apply for different programs that were available. And also at the same time was working to build a business for live streaming for my artists. And through both those areas, I got to know the team at Nito. And Nito was working hand in hand with Niva. And it'll take a step back. Nito is the national independent talent organization. And it's a group of managers and agents that are fighting for issues important to artists, agents and managers. And Niva is a national independent venue association who's doing the same thing for venues. So Niva was working really hard on the Save Our Stages Act. We came in and helped support them and brought the voices of agents, managers and artists behind them that also helped to open the door to get all those teams involved in getting helped from the government during the COVID pandemic. So through that, I ended up getting to know a lot of people within Nito and just agents, managers, people that I maybe talked to from time to time. But now we are all working together to fight for our own survival. And through that, I was able to get involved in a lot of the lobbying for the Save Our Stages Act, as well as educating them on the live streaming business that I built for my artist. And just I really love this camaraderie of managers and agents typically are very siloed. They don't interact with other people. They're not known for being supportive of each other. So it's really the guys, Frank Riley and Wayne and a handful of the other team that started Nito. They really kind of flipped the script on how agents and managers looked at themselves and became this collaborative entity. And as COVID ended, they could have just kind of went away and said, we saved our asses, we're done. But instead, they said, what are other issues that are important that we should be fighting for and let's use this collective brain power and relationships to do more. And the area that I've been passionate about is fighting ticket scalping and changing the laws to protect both the fans and the artists of these predators out there. Yeah, maybe a simple question, but why are you passionate about that? The end of the day, my role as a manager is to protect the artist. And I think through protecting the artist, it's also important. The artist needs to protect their fans. There's a lot of people who look at the fan as just the cash machine to take money from. But you need that fan. Without the fan, you have nothing. So if that fan is the-- Kind of a self-evident statement, but not perhaps not so obvious, unfortunately. Yeah, exactly. And if you ask the scalpers, like, I'm in regular wars on Twitter with a handful of scalpers or their buddies like ticket helper, 1-1-1, or whatever the hell the guy's name is, the guy's got 10,000 followers on Twitter and attacks me all the time because I point out that he's just whipping off artists and fans. He says, you don't give a shit about the fans. You just want to make as much money as you can off of them. And in reality, if the fans overpay for shows, they have less money to buy merch. They have less money to buy drinks at the bar. They have less money to go out to dinner in the neighborhood before the show. They may still come. But this money that was being spread throughout that ecosystem that supports live events, the majority of the money could be just leaving the ecosystem and going to these predators who are sucking it out for their own profits and not reinvesting any of it into the live event. So that's what really drove me to become incredibly passionate about this because it's kind of right and wrong. Somebody's walking in the room and stealing. And there's some people who, you know, they see something wrong and they turn the head there other way, I fight. You know, I've gotten to the point where I've had some friends that asked me, like, are you working on this ticketing thing full-time now? And I'm like, no, I'm a full-time manager. This ticketing thing is just a mental illness. [LAUGHS] Oh my God. No, I mean, you're passionate about helping. And I love that. And the fact that it's not a full-time job, I think makes you so dangerous, you know? Is it just right? Yeah. Because you believe it's right. Exactly. And it is right. Yeah. It is right. And there's a lot of people who care who don't know how to fight and through my work with Nito on this Save Our Stage Act a couple of years back, I've learned now. It's not as hard as you think to get to some of these politicians. Yeah. A lot of them do actually care. And even if they don't care, they care about finding issues to give them wins. So either way, it works for our advantage. So let's-- OK. Beautiful intro. I totally get the arc of your career, getting interested into all of this shit-talking on LinkedIn, shit-talking with the politicians in Washington. But let's kind of wipe the edges, sketch clean here, and go a different direction. OK. But it's related. But ADD is kicking in. Taylor Swift concert happens, paraphrasing here. For the first time ever, perhaps, everyone from local senators, congressmen, congresswoman, all the way up to the president is paying attention to this industry and all the political reporters. And it's like, oh my god, something might happen. I don't think there has ever been a moment where Washington cared as much as what was happening in that moment. And Taylor was perhaps the straw that brought the candles back. But there's a whole psychological discussion about why that was the event that was kind of the shot heard around the world. But it was. There was some interesting things happening with the Biden administration. What's the arc of what happened? What didn't happen? Trump came in. There was news a couple of weeks ago. Niva kind of famously put out a post. And it was fascinating from two angles. Number one was their wording frustrated some of the community. But secondly, it was all-- it was looking past that. There was-- it was like, wait, what the-- Trump's actually doing something in this space. A lot of people assume that the Trump administration was going to have a lighter DOJ on businesses. And let's not be in the game here of saying, I'm not cheering for Trump or neither of us are hitting on our silo. This is be objective and talk about the facts. So give me the arc from Taylor Swift, Biden, to where we are at right now. And there's a lot of fog right now. Our things moving. I've heard rumors of people getting deposed and that the DOJ is actually trying to break up live nation and take a master. Let's dive in. So that's like an hour long conversation. But thankfully, we've got the time right now. But starting back from the beginning, and I'll go back before Taylor Swift, or though Taylor Swift is definitely the straw that broke the camel's back. But since the time of Pearl Jam fighting ticket master in the '90s, through to Taylor Swift, you had a couple of big moments over time where there were big uproars against ticket master. And every one of these times, the scalpers brilliantly played these moments to their advantage. And they hired the top consumer rights lobbyists to fight on their behalf to argue that a ticket is personal property rather than a license to see an event. And most importantly, they went in to meet with these government agencies and say, take a master's a problem, we all agree. We are the fan rights organization of whatever name they had in the moment. And we're here to fix the problem. And in reality, what they did every time they came in the room to say they were fixing the problem, was yet another moment where they were making the problem even worse. And they were helping to write laws that did things like locking transfer ability or blocking an artist from blocking transfer ability of tickets or saying that you can sell an unlimited amount of resale tickets. Like there's just countless laws that they fought for that all this did was give the scalpers more rights. And they convinced the government that the more rights that the scalpers have, the more damage it will do to ticket master. And even to this day, even where the government understanding this issue a lot better. In almost every conversation you have with a politician on either the left or the right, first thing they asked you when you present the solution is and how will this harm ticket master? And you know, just wanna take a step back also and say, I'm not a shell for ticket master. I was a witness in Justice Department inquiry around the live nation ticket master merger. I was a witness on behalf of, well, I'm forgetting their name, song kick against ticket master, a handful of years ago. So I'm not out here to take it master. I'm just out here to kind of lay the facts out. So, you know, taking a step back again to this consumer rights groups fighting on behalf of the scalpers, consumer rights groups for the most part are aligned with Democrats. So the Democrats who typically fight for things that you would think to protect fans and be more, you know, fan friendly and less corporation friendly were fooled into helping these large corporations that are siphoning billions of dollars out of the live entertainment industry. And, you know, to be clear, these ticket scalpers are not matting randy on a street corner. These are private equity backed multi billion dollar corporations. And it is big business. And this big business, brick the Democratic Party for many years into believing that they were the common man or woman on the street corner, you know, just trying to unload their tickets to the show that they couldn't go to. So, you know, fast forwarding to the Taylor Swift moment now. Obviously it explodes. Congress is looking at this again. And, you know, ticket master, as always, was attacked. But for the first time that I've seen, ticket master actually fought back and defended themselves. And that has helped to change the narrative. And part of the reasons that ticket master previously did not defend themselves, you know, you look at an issue like ticketing fees on tickets. A lot of people don't understand that a ticketing fee is not going to ticket master's pocket. It's going in the pocket of the venue and or promoter. And in some limited situations, even the artist's pocket. So, you know, there's these fees are created. Everybody is fighting these fees, but they don't even know where the fees are coming from and where they're going. But I'm gonna pause for a second. - No, fascinating. Keep, I want to encourage you to keep going. A couple of thoughts as you were saying this is, every time I have this conversation, I'm reminded that it's such a nuanced conversation and you can't, you know, just as much as you are tempted to demonize one person or one situation. Like there's just a lot to unpack, unpack. And, you know, for instance, if you look at scalping, like there's a portion of scalping that is just a genuine service to the customers. You know, like, I don't know, some wealthy couple really likes the idea that they can text their friend Joe and Joe gets them tickets. Like that's fairly innocent, right? And then there's, hey, I'm like actually, I'm sick and I can't go to a show. I want to ethical way to transfer my tickets and my friend or to sell it back to the market. You know, like these can oftentimes be cover, if you will, for a very nefarious version of all of that, which is the boss grabbing tickets, junk, you know, selling tickets that aren't even on sale yet and you put your credit card down as a consumer and you didn't even realize that you didn't buy a ticket. Like they're gonna go and then attempt to buy a ticket. But anyway, and then there's the, you know, the battle between ticket master and the scalpers and ticket master is seen as, you know, this corporation that's a part of live nation. You know, I'm not gonna say I do this, but plenty of the industry like imbue them with, you know, evil trades and see them as the big bad wolf in the room. And the scalpers kind of play off of that, but at the same time are, you know, getting regulations, they're using ticket master as the big bag wolf story to get perhaps even more nefarious practices put in place. But then there's the, then you gotta feel the own back a little bit further and, you know, ticket master is now involved in scalping and is one of the biggest scalpers and resellers in the world. So it's a complex kind of back and forth. It's a battle. It's a true battle, you know? And the ticket master, I believe, is the number three biggest resell platform of ticket. - It's the third, okay. - Stop huddling and then what? - I believe stop hubs seat geek. - And it may even be the four, but you have stop hubs seat geek, vivid seats and ticket master or the big dogs. And then, you know, there's a privately owned company called ticket network who has built a lot of the infrastructure for these things and is also a reseller there. They're a big player as well. But, you know, one of the differences between ticket masters marketplace and all these others is ticket master is selling actual tickets in their resell marketplace. One of the things and I just spoke to David Marcus from ticket master last week who confirmed this for me, in order to put a ticket on sale on ticket masters resell platform, you have to have an actual barcode and an actual seat number. - On a platform like some hub, Seek geek, vivid seats, Viagogo, et cetera. - Respect tickets. - Respect tickets and spect tickets. - The ticket master does not have spect tickets. - Correct, they do not have spect tickets. All the other platforms have a policy against spec tickets, but they don't have an infrastructure to block it. And it's a real infrastructure, easy infrastructure to block it. You have to have a ticket to sell a ticket, not run the site. So, you know, they all are spending a lot of money saying that they're against spec tickets and they want to ban spec tips. And that's where this all gets so interesting. They say, "Absolutely, it's against our privacy policy and we're against this, you should make a law ban it." But don't make a law that says that, you know, we need to verify the ticket because that's an honoris request. So, there's just so much bullshit going on with this. And for one thing for people to understand about spec ticks, they are ultimately unregulated equities that are traded. They are so not just like, "Oh, the tickets go on sale Monday and on Saturday I'm gonna sell a ticket." These people are putting tickets up on sale using highly intelligent data platforms to analyze the exact best date to buy a ticket. Typically, tickets at the on sale are very highly priced on the secondary mark. Actually, before the on sale, they're the highest price because they have an exclusive on the tickets before they're available on the legitimate primary platforms. Then you have the on sale, the price typically drops quite often on a show. It just continues to drop. Sometimes the price picks up again a little bit before day of show, you know, the three or four days before the show, you know, there's some demand again, especially on a sold out show and that price can lift again. But they're using these, you know, intelligent platforms using AI and machine learning to pinpoint the exact moment to buy the ticket versus when they sell the ticket so that they can get it at the cheapest possible price. Because you have, you know, guys like Matt and I who can't go to the show, so our ticket up at face value are a little bit more to, you know, just unload our ticket and they have tools that are built to scrape the secondary platforms and alert them and buy the ticket. The second we put a fairly priced ticket on the secondary and then they will pick up that ticket and resell it at a huge profit. Right. I'm just trying, okay. A very, and again, it is a, a beast of a conversation but all right, let's peel it back to the arc. So good, good contacts, didn't start at Taylor Swift. But yeah, what was happening and let's go, was anything actually moving in the Biden administration and what just happened a couple of weeks ago where, you know, Kid Rock and Trump, you know, collaborated and, and respart the conversation. Let's go right to there. Yeah. So the Biden administration was, you know, there were two things. There's the Justice Department case, which is one thing. And then the other thing is Biden was really big on fighting fees and getting rid of junk fees. And the junk, and those are two separate things. So the DOJ case was specifically re litigating live nation into the Vastras acquisition. Is that right? Correct. Okay. And then the junk fee ban or whatever you want to call it is, you know, in my opinion, just nonsense. Because, and you know, this is just me speaking to be clear, and Nito has a different stance than myself on some of these things. But ultimately, the junk fee ban, great intent. You're buying a $50 ticket by the time you get to check out at $75. So the way that if you're lucky, I think, yeah, if you're lucky, seriously. The way Biden, I think, truly believed it, but certainly the way it was presented is, we're gonna get rid of the fee and you're just gonna get your $50 ticket. But in reality, it's now you're gonna see that your $75 ticket is $75 from the second, you step in to buy a ticket. which I agree with, like you should know what you're buying and what the price is. But it didn't really change anything. And you know, the big fights and this is where like I just sort of laugh at all this. Like when you talk to, you know, the agents within Nito and the managers, they say, you know, we need to break out exactly what each of these fees are and every fee needs to be itemized for the fan. And in my personal opinion, the fan has just pissed off that the ticket said 50 and now it's 75. They don't care that it went to the restoration fee and to the promoter and the convenience fee and whatever other fee. They're just say, fuck you and your fees. So my feeling is we don't need to break out fees, but a lot of people don't agree with me on that. Yeah. You know, you, you can go a step deeper and we could eliminate fees if artists agreed to make less money in the gross on shows, then we wouldn't necessarily need fees at all on tickets. Because fees were created as over the past 30 years. Artists slowly started making a larger and larger percentage of the gross and the promoters needed to be able to afford paying these larger percentage guarantees. And they created the fees to fight back at us demanding more money for artists. And I'm, I'm throw making my artists as much money as possible. But at some point, it's gone to the show game where the fan gets fucked. Yeah. Yeah. And I was talking to Wayne and to, oh my god, I'm blanking President of Nido. Wayne's the president of Nathan Nathaniel's. Nathaniel. I was talking to Wayne. Yeah. Sorry. So I didn't need my third cup of coffee today. But I was talking to Wayne and Nathaniel about this and it is a really frustrating conversation to try and peel. I mean, we had a great conversation, but it's just an inherently frustrating predicament that over the course of 30 years you had, dare I call it, just on this communication where one party agrees to hire a higher artist pay and then it's like, okay, but they're not really agreeing that they're slipping the fee in and then the artist gets a sense of that as for more of it. The fees just keep hiding and after 30 years of doing that, the deals are just so messed up and it is contributing to this thing, which is like now made it's all the way up into the executive branch of the government and people are like, it's obviously breaking in a really epic way. It's interesting because it gets grouped into this whole scalping conversation and these are different things. You know, the day they're completely different issues. Yeah. When I sat down, the live nation is DOJ. It's like even you saying that. It's like, yeah, we got to break these things apart. It's fascinating, man. It really is. There's a lot going on here and there's that. Yeah. And when you talk about the DOJ investigating live nation ticket master, you know, I sat down two weeks ago at a big round conference table at the DOJ with ticket scalper lobbyists, our lobbyists on our side, protecting artists and then, you know, Marshall Blackburn's office, like Lee's office, Cory Booker's office, representatives from the FTC and we're all sitting around the table talking about this issue. And you know, one of the really important things that I wanted to strongly flag in this meeting is I'm not an expert on monopolies, whether you break up live nation or ticket master, not my problem, don't care. Do whatever the hell you want to do. But once you decide that, you have to understand that that issue has nothing to do with the high ticket prices on the secondary market and the prices that fans are being ripped off for. So they cannot be confused by these scalpers blaming live nation ticket master for the scalper's behavior. And you know, it's very clear pointing out all these scalpers work, what their goals are, why they're operating the way they are. And you know, at the end of the day, ticket prices are set by the promoter and the artist. Secondary market ticket prices are set by scalpers and their algorithms. And that has nothing to do with whether you have live nation broken into 50 companies or it's one company, the same problem's going to happen. And that we need two completely different solutions. Yeah, yeah, that's super interesting. Okay, so what happened a few weeks ago with this administration? Yeah, so taking a step back, you know, right, I think it was either before Trump was inaugurated or right around the time he was, Kid Rock had, you know, tweeted or set a few things where he's like, you know, now that my buddy Trump's in office, you know, I'm going to work with him to take down the scalpers. And he, I guess, has a very close relationship with Trump. And he explained the issue as he sees it, which, you know, I don't say this often, but Kid Rock and I agree for the most part on what the problems were. And he had, you know, gave Trump all the details he worked very, Kid Rock worked very closely with assistant attorney general, Gail Slater on what the problems were. And then Trump's team drafted this executive order that went to go after scalpers and asked the FTC, the DOJ and the Treasury Department to within six months present a report back to him on what they believe the solutions are to fix this problem. So one important thing to understand is the executive all those all three of those organizations and it comes down to the FTC is unfair civil business practices. The DOJ is criminal and antitrust practices. And Treasury is, are these people actually paying taxes on these transactions? And are they reporting their revenue correctly? Where is the money coming from that's investing into buying these tickets? Are they coming from legitimate sources or illegitimate sources? So his executive order covers some wide areas, but what it doesn't do is create any rule that anyone has to do anything or that anything changes. I had a call with the FTC last Monday and was trying to understand what the executive order does and how I could help present them more information on how the scalpers operate so that they could go after them. And what the FTC explained to me was very clear that the law is the law. The executive order is just a letter from the president and we, you know, they are held to the laws within the bots act that was passed under Obama's administration. And if somebody uses a bot to buy more tickets, then the strict ticket limit on tickets and they can be found to have been broken the rules and use that bot, then they can be prosecuted. But it's pretty much almost impossible to pinpoint that. And I asked them questions like, it's a long story. So let's say industry too, you know, it's like the next show is already being planned and. Yeah. Well, check this out. This will blow your mind. So I said to them, so stay in Matt Ford is selling eight tickets to a show. And we know there was a four ticket limit. And we go after him for breaking the bots act because clearly he used some sort of nefarious practices to acquire more tickets than you're legally allowed. And unless you can show how you use the bot and proof that you use the bot, then it doesn't matter that you have a tickets and broke the ticket limit. So it's, it's nearly impossible. And it's one of these things where both the scalpers and the government blame ticket master because they say ticket master should just tell us when a bot was used to get the ticket. But the problem is a bot is not what most of us think of as a bot. So it's very difficult to figure out these bots are, you know, first of all, they're using IP spoofing to appear like they're most much closer to the venue than they really are. Because ticket master wants to sell to real fans that have IT addresses near the venue. And they use these browser plugins that also have the IP spoofing in them. And these browser plugins allow them to dynamically create a credit card number on the spot so that each ticket that they acquire has a different credit card number. Because that is part of how ticket master decides whether if you're breaking the ticket limit. If it's the same address, same IP address or address IP address and credit card number. But those are the same, then clearly you're trying to exceed the ticket limit. So you have a browser plugin that anonymize all this information, creates a fake address that checks out with the fake credit card number. And then it's very difficult for any ticket system to know that somebody is using a browser plugin to create these things. So it becomes nearly impossible to stop these people. Fascinating, interesting. Okay, so that was the FTC's response to you as you'd follow the law. So then does that, is that like what's, and now you're making the point that the law is near the law is not enforceable. Yeah, so what are they so enforceable? So what's there? What are they doing now then? So, there is a bill in Congress that is working its way through right now called the Ticket Act, which is better than the bots act, but not as good as what we should have out there. And currently, Nino and Niva are not in support of this bill. And this is where again, the nuances get ridiculous. The scalpers love the bill. They think it's great. Ticket master is supporting the bill, but says they don't love it, but it's a compromise. And I think Ticket master, you know, they're under investigation by the Justice Department. They just want all these ticketing things to go away. Yeah. Let's just have a law. And you know, it's, you know, it's better for fans, but it's not as good as Niva. Yeah. Why, what's the, what's the crook's breaking point of the law that they're, that they're not supportive of this? So there's a few things. One is, you know, there's a spectix back, speculative ticketing ban in this bill. But then there's a carve out that says any of these scalper platforms can create a club that you can join a ticket buying club. So they've literally eliminated spec tickets and then are saying that you can have stub hub plus, which is basically a speculative ticketing service that you know, you pay a dollar a year to be a member of and that's totally legal. So they've done what the scalpers have always done and written a law that seems like it's helping that doesn't do a goddamn thing. Interesting. So when you pay a dollar a year for stub hub and get, then, then you can get access to these spec tickets. Yeah. That's basically, and I don't know whether it'll be a dollar a year or five ninety nine a year. It's just a play. It's a price. To play devil's advocate, if the consumer is aware that their purchasing a spec ticket, does that write the wrong? Is it like what's the real problem with the spec ticket? Is it my understanding that it was a lack of awareness? So could you, are they, are they trying to say that like, am I right about that? And if I'm right about that, are they trying to say that, hey, like if they're consciously joining a program and they know what they're getting into and they, they still want to go through it anyway, then we're no different than, you know, the guy, then the whole manual process of calling Larry down the street, you take a guy or whatever. Yeah. It all depends on the presentation. Yeah. So currently, stub hub says that spec tickets are banned on their platform, but they're everywhere. Yeah. So if you're a part of stub hub plus and buried in the terms and service is that stub hub plus doesn't guarantee that it's a real ticket, that's a problem. If stub hub plus is the buying service that states that, you know, you're paying a fee now for a ticket that will be delivered later, that's fine. But it's about transparency and fairness to the fan. So what is, so what is, so I get the FTC's involvement and back to our whole point that these are different topics, you know, live nation, just live nation and ticket master have a monopoly versus, you know, is there a problem with scalping and, you know, promoter deal, promoter and, and agency deals. But you know, why, why is the DOJ, because the DOJ is again, investigating the monopoly between accusation between live nation and ticket master with this most recent, you know, Trump to career, whatever you want to call it, is that right? And why, why are these getting last out together? Yeah. So the Trump to be clear, the Trump executive order has nothing to do with the Justice Department investigation. The Justice Department investigation was launched by Jonathan Cantor in the Biden administration and 30 something state attorney generals and the new assistant attorney general in charge of anti-trust gas later. See is taking is continuing working on the case that was started by the previous administration and is working towards investigating whether or not ticket master is indeed a monopoly or ticket master, live nation is a monopoly. So that's, that's one thing. The executive order is completely different. That's from more recently saying we want to go after these scalpers. It's not really commenting one way or another on the live nation ticket master issue. Okay. Interesting. So what is the DOJ doing the situation? So the DOJ, you know, there's two things to do. One, they're continuing the investigation that started under the Biden administration. Yeah. And then on the, yeah, putting that to the side on the executive order side, they're getting together with the stakeholders in the industry to understand what is the problem. How can the problem be fixed and who are the bad players? What tools the bad players are using? You know, like when I sat in that meeting, you know, one of the things I walked them through is, you know, things like the insomniac browser plugin, what I was kind of explaining to you a little bit before, like, this is a company that is based in the US. The only thing that this browser plugin does is allow people to acquire tickets faster than a human can do and exceed ticket limits. So the way the law is written today, that's legal. But how can they influence that the law is altered or can they prosecute anyway because they can go after these companies? Like they could subpoena a company, potentially. And again, this is, I'm not a law expert. But my theory would be like, they could probably go to insomniac web browser and say, your customers are criminals. Your product is not necessarily criminal, but your customers are subpoena them for their customer records and then investigate to find where the crimes happened. So that's my whole of what the DOJ can do in this. So let me connect the dots a little bit. Let's talk about the live nation, ticket master, allegation. I understand now that this, so the DOJ is looking at something completely different now. They're looking at scalping. The issue is with scalping. A ticket master being the biggest ticketing company in the world. The third biggest scalping platform in the world, as you mentioned, is also involved with that. So now, live nation/ticket master have two separate sex of the Department of Justice investigating them. We too. We're so much easier. We should fully leave those off the table. It's pretty fascinating to think like, again, like if I'm trying to paint the picture here or connect the dots. It certainly didn't help their case. I would imagine. It's like, oh, now we're not going on live nation's door for this other thing. It's curious. So let me, let's talk about this case for a second. Are you surprised that the anti-trust lawsuit, which is different than this executive order, continued with Trump's DOJ? Or is continue, I should say? Yeah. Yes and no. Trump is not as pro business as Trump marches around saying, "I'm not going to do this saying he's pro business," but then these tariffs aren't very good for business. There's a lot of decisions that he makes that aren't pro business. He's kind of, in a lot of ways, anti-big tech. It overly doesn't surprise me. Interestingly, JD Vance, who has a lot of influence on the Trump administration, obviously, had a lot of good things to say about Lena Khan, who was the previous head of the FTC. Yeah. So brutal by many people's perspective. Yeah. I mean, the way I look at this specifically, yeah. You have that political wheel where you know, up at the top, you know, you have liberal conservative, you know, middle of the road. You go down and you get all the way down to the bottom. And I feel like some of these people are meeting at the bottom. And the horseshoe area. There's suddenly aligned again in their radical views, just as some of them are aligned in their middle of the road views. So it doesn't overly surprise me that the investigations continued. I would ask you assume that they're going to view it through a different lens. It's completely different people investigating, you know, within the DOJ. So there's going to be, you know, different outcomes. Whether, you know, one outcome was better for them under the last administration, or a system administration. I don't think anyone knows. But I do think, you know, the outcomes could change, but you know, the investigation, I'm not surprised that it continues. Yeah. So many, so many places in this conversation that I want to go. I think, I think the place that I want to go right now is a conversation that you and I had about, like some of the negative backlash that, you know, Niva, Niva got when there was an Instagram post congratulating Trump. And you know, a lot of the Niva community is, you know, feels, you know, it feels very sensitive about the topic. But you know, you, you said something along the lines of, you know, you don't care who's in office. You want to help, you want to solve this for the industry. And that's my words of your translation. So like, why don't you strong man kind of like, what's your take on this? You know, like, like, I know that you're, you're democratic leaning based off of our conversations, but you seem inclined to like wanna work with this administration. And you know, why don't we talk about this, this very kind of sensitive juicy topic, which is perfect for a podcast. - No, totally, absolutely. You know what it comes down to is our country over the last 30 years, you know, and more so more recently has gotten so polarized. And you cannot agree with your enemy on an issue. And it's, you know, it's just reached a point where we're at stalemates on everything. And you know, I've had countless friends say, you know, you're gonna go meet with the Trump Justice department, why would you do that? They're the bad guys. I mean, at the end of the day, these bad guys are on the right side of this issue. And if they're on the right side of the issue, I don't care that they get a win that is going to help the fans and help my business. At the end of the day, I report back to my clients and my clients report back to the fans. And if we can create a win for those fans, I don't think that many fans are gonna care whether a Democrat or a Republican fixed a ticket scalping problem. So I just think we need to, you know, as a country, just look at this better. You know, I said at the table, the DOJ, with some people that I see eye to eye on a lot of issues with and some people who, you know, I've despised things that their teams have said. But I kind of talked out all off the table when I went in the room and said, "We agree on this issue. This isn't the time to debate why you're against things I believe in. This is the time to discuss what we do all agree with." And I just think that that's a problem with America as a whole these days, regardless of party. There's this hate-down mentality. And, you know, to go to your question about the Niva post, you know, in this politically sensitive time, did Niva make a mistake thanking Trump? Yes. But their intent was, we're happy that something was said by the government that is going to help venues, that is going to help artists, and it's going to help fans. And if I were the leader of that organization, I'd probably would have said, we are happy about this legislation, rather thanking specific people who passed the legislation. And, you know, that's just the times we're in. And, you know, you need to be cognizant of these things because the nuance of thanking someone versus being thankful is very different. And, you know, I'll go step further and say, - Yeah. - Right. A few people have asked it, why is Trump on the right side of this issue? Why would he do this? - That doesn't make any sense. - There we go. That's a fucking important question. - Yeah. And I'll tell you my personal opinion on it. And whether I'm right or wrong, who knows? - Trump is enamored by celebrity. I think we can all agree with that, whether you're Democrat or Republican. He loves celebrity. Musicians are celebrity. If he could do something to support celebrities. - Interesting. - It is going to put him in better graces with celebrities. So I view it as, you know, - That's a hot take, man. I've never heard that. Wow. - I mean, it like, the piece and that together and the way you just say, it's pretty fascinating. - And it tracks. Like he is an outsider who wants to be accepted by Hollywood. And this is an olive branch to Hollywood. And I'm not saying, - It's an olive branch to parts of Hollywood and then perhaps, you know, not, you know, yeah. - It's not to everyone, but it's not an FU to anyone in Hollywood. So it is, it is only an olive branch in this scenario. And you know, he's done a lot of things that those people despise, but, you know, a lot of people, you know, it's their career. They need to eat, you know, it's just like Apple is in there pushing for what they need. Like do you think, you know, a guy like Tim Cook, who's, you know, a gay man is supporting a lot of Trump's policies. That'd be very surprised if he is. - Yeah. - But his job is to support the company that he works for and the shareholders and he's going in there and becoming friends with him to get what is needed for what his job is. - Yeah. And I guess the respect and honor everyone's, you know, sensitivity to this issue. I stayed relatively quiet and just kind of like, watch what happened and I won't say who she is, but I was talking to a partner of ours, a woman who's married to a woman, she's a woman of color. And, you know, it for many reasons are, is not politically lined with, like the conservative party right now. And she was telling me a story of, you know, a senator that helped the cause and she shook the person's hand on stage. And this particular senator had been one of the leading voices against gay marriage. Like peeling it back, you know, not just like, you know, really actively trying to do it. And on one end, she said she saw, she's, that's a threat to her identity and her family. And many of her structures. And she, and rightfully so of course it is. But on the other end, the senator helped her. So she put a smile on and she shook her hand. And that was her perspective on how she wins the battle or how she might maybe loses a battle in that moment, but wins the war. And, you know, I thought it was an enlightening take and it's a line with what you're saying. And, you know, out of fear of like setting up too much straw man, like I do think it's important to, you know, words do matter in this political environment. But, you know, a straw man question would be like, you know, what, what should Niva do over the next four years if, you know, this is the administration we have to work with, right, to get this stuff done. You know, genuine question like, is the alternative perspective like we should just not care about solving these issues over the last four years? I don't think anyone really would really argue that, you know, it's, yeah, I don't, and I, and I respect people's pain deeply, you know, and, and they feel like there's just something, there's something abnormal about the moment today. Like it's not just politics is normal where you swallow a pill, you don't like and, I don't know, you know, I, I, I hope that's actually just not true and, and we just need, and every generation just deeply cares about what they care about. You know, anyway, it's an unbelievably sensitive topic. Yeah. Yeah. I'll say just close, close this portion of off, you know, the thing thing I'll say is like, there's people who I just pies what they stand for, who have worked with their teams. And you know, part of my goal is to humanize who we are, humanize their side. And you know, like, I've looked some of these people in the face and they don't seem like bad people. You know, when I read the quotes of them, when I hear what they say, they're the most despicable humans on earth. Yeah. But when you get in the room and you talk to some of these people, you're like, well, maybe their motive comes from a good place and they don't understand us. And if we can work together on this issue that we do agree with, maybe we could bring 1% more humanity to these people. It doesn't mean I'm defending their ways. But my goal is to show humanity to people who I despise. So you hope that we could see some humanity in return. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if I could interject to, like, what do we go to the other side of that coin? You said one interesting question is, why is Trump on the right side of this and his administration at this time? And I had talked offline about why is the inverse also true that the Democrats in some situations have landed on the wrong side of this. And you know, you shared a, if you don't mind, kind of speaking about your perspective on that and what you've seen. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the Democrats are realizing some of the mistakes that they made. But the story is, for 20, 30 years, ticket master was the enemy. These scalpers hired consumer rights groups, which are aligned with Democrats. Democrats, you know, crossed the consumer rights groups. So first of all, a trusted source came in to talk to them. So, you know, they weren't skeptical of them. And they misunderstood a lot of these issues. But what's really interesting is, as we work together on the Save Our Fages Act, a part of these Democratic politicians got to know all of us from our side of the industry. And they used to turn to their ticketing experts when they had a question about ticket master and their ticketing experts were the scalpers. Now they just saved our industry and had built relationships with us. So, hey, what do you think? And they heard a very different answer. And they've reacted to these new answers. And, you know, I don't want to name the politician, but a very high profile. Democratic Senator told a very good friend of mine, point blank, we know who the enemy is on this. But the consumer rights groups have so much influence on us that we can't go against that. And then it's a nuanced argument and it's something that is going to take time to change and that they just can't fight back. So they realize it now, though. They see what happened and they's consuming, you know, what I feel like we need to do as an industry is get with these consumer rights groups and educate those who don't understand what's really going on and shun them from taking money from bad people. And this is kind of going off on a tangent, but not in the UK. The scalpers made a big move last year to try to change the laws and parliament. They held this big anonymous meeting where they let everyone know it's okay to be anonymous, just come to the meeting. They invited a bunch of big name UK lobbyists to the meeting as well. And the lobbyists refused to take on the scalpers as clients. So we need to figure out how to shun these consumer groups in the US so that they won't take the business from these scalpers because in the UK, they saw what was going on in the US and they said, no, no, no, we don't want any part of this. And it was an unbelievable moment to see the lobbyists refuse their money. But I guess maybe that's the difference between the UK and the US. Yeah. Interesting. To try and bring this up, I mean, it's an unbelievably complex web that's going on here between, we've already laid it out so I won't relay it out. But let's try and tie a bow on it if it's humanly possible. So breaking out all these issues individually, are you optimistic that the government can do something to make this better and what is it? And let's just stick to the scalping. Yeah. So on the scalping side of things, we have 30 plus states looking at 60 something different bills right now that the Fix the Tix coalition is tracking. The vast majority of them are good bills. We have this moment coming off of last year with the Taylor Swift debacle. And it is still front and center and people are hungry for wins. So I've never been more confident, but I will say that if we don't get through it and these congressional sessions this year and these scalpers were able to run the clock and not have these things voted on, I'm not so optimistic that this fight continues for years to come. I think we either see changes this year or we're waiting until the next Pearl Jam moment, the next string cheese incident moment, whatever the next big ticketing flash is. I hope that we could see some change. But this bill on the Congress on the federal level is a step in the right direction. And the fact that Trump signed an executive order on a Monday and myself and a handful of other people who are hauled into the DOJ to meet with them on Friday, that tells me they're taking this seriously. And all we can do is continue to raise our voice. And I think people should join organizations like NIDO, if you're agent or manager or NIVA, if you're venue and share the problems that you're facing with these organizations and hope to get your voice extended into these rooms. I mean, that's what I did. I was the biggest loudest mouth in NIDO about scalping and I learned the most about it. So in the DOJ call, it was like, Randy is the guy to send it to the room. So anyone who's passionate about these things and learning about them, they need to join these organizations, have their voice heard and used and we can make a difference if we actually use what we're learning and band together. Love it. What is that? But the perfect solution occurs. What does the fan mind experience look like if you could just, yeah, if it's a perfecting glaze out as it go, scalping go away completely, is it more so? Is it limited to like ethical transfer? Like what are we trying to attain here? Yeah, I think the perfect solution involves a limiting box, just making that illegal for anyone to use any tool that allows you to get a ticket faster than anyone else. A cap on the price of tickets that you can resell them for, be that 20%, 25%, some reasonable number on this most recent Taylor Swift tour on the tickets that she did drops of the week of the show where they had a few last tickets that they were dropping. The scalpers mastered picking up those tickets and were selling them at a 70X return. That should not be an issue. Like even if it's that the scalpers can only sell tickets for double, I don't know what the number is. I don't care. That's for smarter people than me to negotiate. But let's have a limit on how much people can resell tickets for. You should allow fans to be able to, you know, sell a ticket if they can't go to a show to send it to a friend. All these things should be done. Like it shouldn't empty the fans' ability to take the risk to buy a ticket, but it shouldn't allow a carpet bagger to come in and take more money out of the gross than the artist or the promoter makes. You know, it's really fascinating just to put my perspective on it. It's like from the scalpers perspective. Let's not even talk about the giant private equity back companies. But if I'm just a random guy, I might be versed in the art of predicting when a show is going to sell out. And I'm going to buy for Taylor Swift's ticket. It's like financial trading. Like I'm going to buy four of these tickets up front and I'm going to be able to make a return on in the future. It's a philosophical curiosity as to why that's inherently wrong. You know? Yeah. And I mean, it could be argued that it's not wrong. You know, there's no, you know, like ethically, I would say ethically, it's wrong. You know, you go back to the Bible. Well, I'm not a Bible guy, but like you can't make it interesting or whatever. Yeah. You know, there's all these things like that. So going back to the Bible times, it's people manipulating things to make more money. Nobody's ever liked it. Well, Randy, I think I answered my own question. I think kind of like if Matt or Randy did that, I'm not, I don't have a guilty conscience here or anything like that. I'm like, oh, I got a side hustle. But you know, if you or I did it at an individual case basis and I have a little side thing or whatever, like, you know, that's not the issue. The issue is that there's these bots grabbing like artificially creating that demand. And this just becomes a standard and it's just gotten sought of control. So it's one of these situations like where, you know, how do you not swing the pendulum so hard that you kind of, you know, disrupt the whole darn thing and yeah. And that's, that's what's important. It's important to not go too far because you know, one of the interesting things, you know, using Taylor Swift as the example again, a significant amount of the tickets on the secondary market were parents who were just like holy shit. I could do, you know, yeah, vacation for a week in Europe with our family. And sell these tickets. Sorry girls. Yeah. Yeah. And that happened. And that happened a lot. You know, I've gotten to talk to a lot of scalpers, you know, kind of what I said before with politics. You know, if you talk to people you don't like and don't believe in, you can learn a lot from them. And I've done the same thing with a lot of scalpers. And I've gotten to understand from them what went on during Taylor Swift and they'll tell you like, you know, bots won on this one, fans won on this one. You know, I believe them. There's no reason why they're going to lie in those scenarios on which ones were which. And they pointed out that a lot of parents on Taylor Swift were the resellers. And you know, like I've heard it and seen it myself. So it is that wrong. If there's, you know, 10 million people that want to go to a show that there's two million tickets for and you want to take your family to Disney World instead of tagging. And then you know, I think Taylor Swift, and that's what the value is today. Like, it might be morally wrong, but even that's questionable. But using the various tactics to do it is absolutely wrong every time. And, you know, like I have a recording of a scalper who was just like the most offensive shit, but I had a conversation with him on Twitter's faces. And like he just said, some really derogatory things towards Taylor Swift and then said, but, you know, but I love her. I have all the nice things in my life because of Taylor Swift, one direction and you know, whatever the third app that he named. And he was like, wasn't for them. I wouldn't have everything I have today. So that's where it's a problem. And you know, these people who make tens of millions of dollars or these, you know, private equity owned businesses making billions of dollars a year, that's where the problem is. Yeah. And again, I'm going to try, I tend to make a point that's like almost two complex to make even as I'm thinking about this. But, you know, if, okay, so if you take away the security trading element of buying tickets and your, and someone's prediction and someone or an algorithm's prediction ability to say, hey, you can buy low and sell high on the show. You know, what that does is just cycle the money back to the promoter, to the venue, to the artist to price the show accordingly. And, you know, maybe, you know, what happens is like, oh my God, like we, we massively underpriced the show and we found that out. Well, they would, then they would just be forced to kind of like, okay, well, let's go do another show and, and then we can, you know, increase the ticket price the way that we. We think it might and then it goes into this kind of question also about, you know, ethics and who does the, you know, who is the industry for? Because with the Taylor Swift tickets, you had to be able to afford them. And, you know, where does affordability come into the conversation in a cap and then you throw this, then you, uh, then you throw that into the fact that we're in a society that is a capitalist society and, um, you know, in these folks are free to charge whatever. Price kind of makes sense, uh, in terms of the demand. And it's just, it's a, it's a wild that when you get it to the top. Now granted that level of kind of mismatched pricing and expectations. Perhaps only happened at the Taylor Swift level and happens below Taylor Swift. But let's keep in mind Taylor Swift, you know, known could have predicted how unbelievable, how, how much fire that to or caught. Um, but yeah, it's a curious question and to, to, you know, peel to summarize it again. Yeah. If the, if the ticket, if the scalpers are not, you know, speculating, then, you know, the concert promoter and the artists themselves are just kind of back in this place around saying, all right, like what's, what's our decision of how much money we want to make off this? How much could we make? But how much do we want to make considering we want to keep affordability in mind? And, and then, uh, well, you know, ultimately returns the power back to the promoter and the artist. So anyway, uh, a, a, a, a problem. I go ahead and I want to touch on this because this speaks to your clients of your company completely. And, you know, the, the people in the middle. And, you know, these thousand cap clubs that have, you know, five, six shows a week, you know, they work on tight margins. They're, they're not making, you know, us as the artist, we think you're ripping us off on every show. You know, you're ripping up, you're ripping my artist off. But you know, the other shows you're an honest business. You know, it's like that kind of nonsense. But at the end of the day, if you have a 10% drop every night because of scalpers, that's 10% of bar that you're not making. It's 10% of merch that the band's not making it. You have, you know, food as well. That's 10% less that you're making of that. And a lot of these businesses, you're talking about 10, 15% margins. And these scalpers by, you know, 200 tickets to, uh, um, you know, what happens all the time? I see like 400 tickets get picked up at a quick little whim by the scalpers on a thousand cap club show. So those tickets, if they sell 100 of them at a massive profit, they've made their money. They don't care if they drop the price. They don't care if those tickets sell. But for you as a club owner, if those people don't come through the door on that sold out show, you may still lose money. And that's a huge problem. And that's where we really need to be cognizant of the scalpers. We could talk about the outliers of Taylor Swift. That's interesting. That's what really catches everyone's attention. Right. When I'm sitting down with the DOJ, you know, Tom DeGeorge from the crowbar story. So the attorney general, I think is way more valuable where he says, you know, he sees 10% of every show is sitting on stub hub. And never enters the venue on sold out shows and he can't afford to keep his doors open because of it. That's a fucking problem. And that's not, you know, you know, somebody taking a couple of dollars out of rich Taylor Swift's pocket. That's an institution in a community that has allowed the next superstars to break. You know, using Thomas and example again, I was talking to him about, um, Dochi, the local rapper that played all the open mic nights and his club. Actually, she didn't. She used to hang out at them. He said she hung out and didn't play them. She was afraid. It was almost like a eight mile, bad story. Like, see hung out in his club that helped her to develop her talent to where she is a massive superstar now. And, you know, that's the damage that's done. Taylor Swift making $10 million less across, you know, a couple of shows doesn't matter. But 10 come to Georgia's going out of business make a major difference on our entire community. And that's where the scalpers hurt us the most. Yeah. Interesting. Um, man, I speak to him talking shit on LinkedIn. I threw out an idea the other day. Like, okay, we can sit around and we can wait for uh, the government to try and regulate this. I shouldn't say wait for it. We can push the government to really, it's an earnest effort. It matters. But like, what, what, what could we do without the government? Now, you know, strong man, uh, whether this would work or are not work. Couldn't every primary ticketing company come out with a ID required ticket, you know, feature where you buy a ticket and you have to have an ID. A government facilitate ID to enter enter the show. Um, and, and then, and then they monitor transfer as well. And then they set that 20% price themselves. Like couldn't, couldn't, couldn't just be a selling point for an event, Brian or a dice or a, a freaking or, you know, any of these folks to say like, hey, like, If the, if the artists of the promoter says they want to show, we can kill scalping on the show just by requirement, current government ID. Well, here's the yes and no. So I had two calls yesterday alone with two different companies that are involved in ticketing and real IDs. One being a company called verify with a B and another one called tick space. And they both have ID based ticketing tools. One that can license the other ticketing companies. One is a ticketing company themselves. And you know, I started going through with that. I said, you know, what happens if people do identity sharing, you know, what's to say, you know, right now you can buy and sell ticket master accounts. What's to say that, you know, Matt the scalper can't pay me 10 bucks to use my ID to buy a ticket. And they did have some technological solutions for, yeah. So I do believe identification, Partick it would be a great solution. Yeah, but I don't know if it's legally allowed based on the laws that have been written today that are so protective of scalpers. I don't know that it's allowed. What? No, you need an ID to buy a flight. Actually, I should say you need an ID for fly. You need an ID to get on the flight. That's exactly right. Yeah. And there's no scalping in flights. Like they that solved, you know, completely exactly. I mean, I love the concept. It's why like I said yesterday I was on the phone with two different companies working on that technology because I do believe that that's the future. But the problem is the law. There are so many laws to protect these scalpers. You know, at the end of the day, interest, you know, I said something directly to assisted her to general slater, where I said, you know, I wanted to strangle kid rock when he was in the White House on one specific thing. He said, he said, I'm a Republican, but in this situation, I am pro regulation. And before I could finish my sentence, she said it is exactly what we want the DOJ to understand in this. She said, you're right. It's a free market. And you should be able to control your product in your market. And that is truly a free market regulation coming in and telling us how to buy and sell our product is regulation and the opposite of a free market. So it's just super interesting at the end of the day. Like what we need is a free market and we need to have control over our own product. Interesting. Yeah. And you say when you say we, who do you because then you could just bounce back and say, well, the consumer has control of their pockets. So therefore you should let scalping happen. When you say we, who do you mean the artist? Yeah. I mean, the people who invest in live events. Yeah. I agree with you. I agree with you. That's how they move the goalposts. Right. You know, that's that's how the scalpers move the goalposts for sure. But the people who are investing in producing great live events do it have the ability to decide whether tickets can be resold. Yeah. How many times they can be transferred? You know, there's there's a real solution too. Well, you know, like we can't go to the show. You know, you can transfer the ticket to your friend wants maybe you can transfer the ticket twice. Sure. And in those edge cases, you know, where the third person, you know, one out of every 500 million times that, you know, you need to get to the fourth person and you only allow to be transferred. In that scenario, but there be a solution where somebody can decide whether you're allowed to make the transfer. Like there, there are ways to protect the fans and all this and there needs to be ways. And the fan could never become victim to any of this. It's just a matter of blocking the bad actors. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fascinating question of incentives. And I think a lot of the ticket companies aren't perhaps incentivized to solve this because they even though it met, muddies the water is deeply. There's income that comes from the secondary. That is hard to look past. That's like I guess one thing that we didn't bring up like why why why don't the ticket companies to solve it? Well, could you expect to solve it if they're making a much of money office, you know, yeah, no. And I mean, it's, it's a very, very fair question is what more can the ticketing companies do. So I think we all know there's more they can do. They're creating tools to allow these scalpers to be in business. For instance, because there's because there's money there. There's money in it that say you can't beat them. Join them, you know, and it's it's a very curious because again, we live in America. I like. like it's a capitalist society. Like it's frustrating the level of incentive. So then I guess you go back to full circle and say, okay, like you can't expect the ticketing companies to do it on their own free will because there's too much incentive to not. So therefore there's regulation that gets passed then okay, then they have to do it. Anyway. - But if we look at ticket master and I don't want to sound like a ticket master shell because I'll tell you a bunch of bad stuff too on this topic. - Yeah. But ultimately they were legally required to allow transfer of their tickets. They had to create technology to allow their tickets to be transferred to other platforms. So you know, like if you buy a ticket on stub hub, there has to be a way to verify the ticket on ticket master and transfer it to another person. So if you're a company and you have to build that tech, how do you not then build the tech to allow that to happen on your own platform? If nothing else, you learn how the business works with the hope that eventually resell only happens on your own platform. Like my feeling is that we should get rid of the scalpers and access should have their own resell platform. Pre-kindles should have their own resell platform. Ticket master should have their own resell platform. And the market could operate very fairly like that rather than these multi-billion dollar marketplace companies. And there's a lot of them. It was about to say before a ticket master has a tool called Trade Desk. And Trade Desk allows you to distribute your ticket as a scalper to every single secondary marketplace. But the thing to point out though is stub hub has their tool, victory live, which is one of these private equity back companies has theirs. Picket network has theirs. There's at least a dozen that I know of these other platforms. So it's ticket master doing a disservice to their shareholders if they don't operate. And that's again, something for smarter people than me to decide. But I think the answer is that anyone who has a platform that the nefarious actors of a core customer, they don't deserve to be in business. Do you? This is perhaps, let me go a different direction here. We're wrapping up here. So maybe throw a couple of fastballs out. Even though you laid out that the live nation to get master allegation of a monopoly is a separate case. And on the surface or even with a deep analysis, it's a very different situation. It satisfies the lizard brain, if I will, to assume that that would be a major domino effect in creating positive change. That's one perspective you could take being political with my words here. Yeah. Yeah. So even though they're separate, could you strong man the case that that is actually an important thing for the industry and outside of strong man, like what's your perspective? Do you want to see that happen? Do you think, yeah, anyway, yeah. Why don't we start with strong manning it? Yeah. So I'll tell you what I see happening is if, let's say, they just split live nation and ticket master. I'll tell you the next thing that happens. Is live nation and ticket master do a five year ticketing agreement that live nation is promised a fuckload of money from ticket master in exchange for their access to tickets? Then live nation is spending the next five years to figure out, are they building their own ticketing company? Are they doing a partnership with another company? Are they going to go back to what they did before they merged with ticket master and partner with, like, say, CTS event and try to resurrect their failed partnership that they had last time. And we haven't fixed anything. I've been around on this business long enough to remember hating ticket master as an independent company and not hating ticket master as a partner with a concept promoter. Wow. So I don't see how splitting them up solves that specific issue. But now let's say that they split ticket master up into five companies, like they did with the phone company in the 1980s, I think it was. Then, you know, that's way more interesting. But I think that's pretty far fetched to imagine that they're going to split up live nation and ticket master and then split up live nation and ticket master a second time, you know, to, you know, make even more companies. So, you know, on the surface, my feeling is splitting up these two companies does absolutely nothing in the short term to do a damn thing. Five to 10 years from now, it could have an influence on the market. But again, everything in ticketing is currently about these exclusive ticketing contracts. So they need to do something to end exclusivity at some point also. Yeah. And, you know, I will say that a lot of venues don't want to end exclusivity because part of those exclusive contracts are huge advances that they use for their capital improvements to their venues or just operational ink. Right. Yeah, it's been a lot of time talking about the psychology of the exclusive deals. And what, you know, what those, if you were to look at them as alone, what the interest rate ends up being is absolutely absurd. Yeah. And I mean, you could see. Yeah. You could see a completely new financial model where companies present loans to venues against their ticketing fees, rather than ticketing companies, resenting those loans. Because they do need those loans and there is guaranteed funds. So perhaps that is the answer. And there's some, there's a company that's, have you heard about this? There's a company that's attempted to do this. Is that, oh, I think I saw him at, I'm forgetting his name. Boris from C-Ticket. Yes, Boris, exactly. I'm sure it's a company that's an independent, you know, kind of model. And yeah, you know, I think breaking up, yeah, having these incentives tied together is probably where you start getting in trouble. And an independent company to provide the loan off of the fees is probably better than the ticketing company doing itself. That's another three hour podcast. But it's, you know, it is a fascinating concept because, you know, we see it with prism where, you know, not even prism, like, you know, for a venue to write a $10,000 check or for, you know, whatever, it's a huge deal, right? But a ticketing company comes in and says, okay, we'll give you a hundred thousand up front, but we're going to take four dollars of every ticket and you're going to, and we're going to make about a million bucks off of that in the next three years. And they're like, all right, you know, yeah. And it goes back to this ticket fee conversation and the world generally seeing ticket price being hugely elastic and this horn of plenty that the scalpers can participate in, that you can just throw fees to the consumer and it's all good, but I don't know. I have a more simple view on it that, like, let's go back to the basics. If you're, if you're consumer, if I'm running a venue and the consumer swipes $35 with their credit card or $90 or whatever, you know, if, if 20 of that is the fee, well, that's, that's my revenue. And there's an expense to, you know, the fee, whether it's going to a scalper or whoever, but it's a lot of, it's, it's going to take, I mean, it's a very different way than the industry thinks about things right now after 30 years of, you know, a Vancex bringing us to here. So it's, part of me is kind of cautious to get optimistic that there's going to be real change, but to hear, you know, you seem quite optimistic and I'm grateful to hear your perspective on that. - I'm somewhat, I'm somewhat optimistic. I'll close with saying this. Live Nation was built by buying monopolies from individual markets, buying Bill Graham presents, buying Delzner Slater presents. All these companies were the monopoly in their market and the business model for almost 50 years and the music industry has been monopoly in individual market and all they did is roll up the monopolies. The entire structure of our industry needs to change in order to see major change. And I am not optimistic that we see the entire structure of our industry change and that is how shows are bought and sold and how artists are compensated and how fees are factored into it. All of those things need to change and you know, I wouldn't hold my breath on that. - Yeah, yeah, it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort and, but anyway, thank you for doing what you're doing. I know you're chipping away at that massive problem. - Thanks, I'm enjoying doing it. Anyone who wants to join the fight, you know, come join Nito, Niva or any of our other organizations that are doing this fight. - Well, it's been an incredible conversation. I'm gonna have to relisten to it myself to like all the things that I learned about this complex web. I mean, the more that I learn about it, frankly, the more that I feel like it's just, you know, the onion kind of peels back and peels back and peels back. - It's back, it peels back. - We didn't even dig in that deep, which is frightening. - It's fractals all the way down, for sure. - Yeah. (laughs) - Well, good combo, man. Keep up the good work. I think you're doing the Lord's work over there. - Thank you. - Yeah, you bet. - Cool. So just a little quick pod add on. It's been about a month since Randy and I first talked and I was about to launch this and figured, let's make sure everything is up to date. So, yeah, Randy, what's happened the last month, month and a half since the executive order came down? I mean. On my son as a ticket buyer all these ticketing websites are doing upfront pricing if I'm I mean at least the ones that I've seen That's for sure changed, but anyway, let me pass to you like what's yeah, what's what's different? What's not different? What's what's the news and or maybe there's no news as the news? Yeah, yeah, so starting with the fees that you mentioned That was something from the prior presidential administration It was one of Biden's big things and he was passionate about was you know killing junk fees and As we all know politicians say one thing and reality is very different so He didn't really kill the junk fees. We now see what the junk fees are and That is the big change that you see and you know, there's all in ticketing now and you can see what all the fees are and Not a bad thing not upset about it But it doesn't save any money for the consumer. It doesn't change how money flows from ticketing companies artists or promoters Or impact the fans other than they could see what the numbers are now So kind of very unexciting, but it is a change, but just to know that the good news of that is that change is You know over a year old that was just finally implemented so yeah things moved really slowly in Washington DC and in state legislatures So I think we will start seeing more change, but it's just gonna take a while One big win that we have since we last spoke is the state of Maine Last week passed a bill that Ben speculative ticketing That's all that caps resale ticket fees It will supposedly cap the price that scalpers can sell tickets for All the press is saying that it does it now, but if you read the bill it doesn't actually say that But apparently there's something in How laws work each state has very strange Ways that laws are finalized and from what I've read When the law is finalized it will ban Markup of tickets above 10 percent although it doesn't today, but the bill hasn't been enacted into law even though the governor signed it so it's this Weird limbo period there Other than that on the federal level Um, the ticket act is still sitting in Congress or on the Senate side of Congress and as I'm sure people will probably know if they're listening to this in the next few days All Congress has been working on is Trump's big beautiful bill, you know love it or hate it. It's all they're working on so Everything's kind of sidelined. We expect that they may look at the ticket act in the Senate Sometime after September We'll we'll see what happens there, but um, we don't love that bill as I think we talked about when we spoke last time, but um The big step in the right direction with some more disclosures a few additional protections, but we'd like more protections Um, and the only other interesting thing is in New York state We thought we were gonna get a new law here that changed um a lot of the really shitty ticket scalpen laws in New York New York's one of these few states That has laws that very strongly protect the scalpers You know some of their favorite laws in the country when they're doing lobbying they always talk about you know We need to model after New York and we were really close to changing the laws significantly in New York But um at the 18th hour they held in the bill and are gonna work on it again in next session in 2026 But it's not totally dead, but um It's not being dealt with again for a chunk of time Interesting um my uh There's so much to talk about my my head is going back to Kind of doing a little bit of more of a deep dive on you know What does actually happen because it's you know what could happen is like you made it like What could happen what people say are gonna happen and then you and then you put the US government equations like um Okay, who knows right, but you know the exact uh the thing that has actually happened is this ticketing update and I hear your point that like let's let's let's double click on this philosophical for a second and I had a I was watching this to see if a domino tips over and I think the first domino tipping over is nothing But I'm wondering if it leads to a mosaic of dominoes tipping over And like let me get your perspective on this for a second and You know, I think trying to connect a lot of complex dots here You have um you know the funding the flow of money and the funding source in the industry Um like at what at what point is that the source of it but at what point is a venue Getting upfront money from a ticketing company um the ticketing company getting paid back in the fee And then the promoter essentially having this perspective that hey um you know if I have a $25 ticket that goes to $30 at checkout Um, there's there's a certain amount of money that I could either put in at checkout later That doesn't it doesn't matter. It does it. It's free money essentially that like that's their perception and and they say they're their studies like You can pat a fee by 20% without affecting checkout or something like that And then you know that there's also a side channel in In that discussion with the agent to like you know the agent gets gets an offer with a $25 ticket All of a sudden goes on sales and it's $32 it's $34 So I was wondering if the the domino that tips over is like affects that whole situation and now Now promoters have to advertise a $32 ticket instead of a $25 ticket and there's no longer this You know like arguably that affects the elasticity of the you know that the elasticity of the market and um and the or will be elasticity The market I should say affects whether whether or not people buy tickets and that puts pressure on promoters to not have as much fees because You know, they don't want to be known as a you know from agents to like okay my my By $24 tickets going to turn into $32 so to me it could be a domino that affects it ticketing Deals and also the agent deals. I mean are you seeing that happen or people just kind of like this is the new normal Like you know you might you might negotiate a $25 ticket with from an agent manager perspective with one promoter It turns into $40 and then the next promoter it turns into $30 and now that it's not stuck in the checkout You know does that change things a bit anyway. That was a tornado of words But please Randy pick it up for me. Yes. Yeah, so I feel like there's a few different answers to this question And the first piece of the puzzle though I'd say is you talk about an advertised ticket price I almost never see an advertised ticket price anymore. Yeah, that seems to be good coming something of the past You don't really know a ticket price until you click in to buy a ticket at the on sale I know ticket prices for my artists when I put them on sale and Those are kind of some of the only ticket prices that I really know anymore And when I click to buy a show I don't see it in the social media announcement. I don't see it in the social media ad I only see that price when I go to add to cart So you have that piece of the puzzle where I don't know that the all in fee is changing that Line set of a fan that much because they're used to sticker shock as they go through the process Now they're just not going to see sticker shock as they go through they see sticker shock up front So I don't know that that changes but the other aspects that I think you are doesn't that kind of debunk the It's an interrupt real quick doesn't that debunk? Yeah, go please Doesn't that then debunk the lie that the industry has been telling itself that you can just stop the fee in you know, and it's like essentially like You know what I'm saying like like the perception all along is like it's really meaningful If the customer's gonna check out at 32 It's gonna have we're gonna have better sales if They start at 25 and it gets at 32 right is that's been the whole Kind of selling point of ticketing companies and promoters is that That it actually does matter what you arrive at versus what you check out on and there's oh there's wiggle room essentially So shouldn't it affect things to start like macro economically Or well, should either expect things or should debunk the past view right that oh I'm not sure that it does either because you're just starting at a higher price now Hmm, so you might be you know if you're a $75 ticket that pushes up to 110 You know that person's limit if it was a hundred dollars They may not buy that hundred dollar ticket if it was listed at seven five anyway, so right everybody has the limit of what they can and will spend But I understand what you're saying with that psychology that you know if it was listed as 75 and your limit was a hundred And it's only 110 and it's a good seat so you're gonna buy it anyway. Yeah, there is that but bottom line is that's a shitty customer experience Couldn't read more. Yeah, I know you're on the right side of that but my feeling is This is really all about making the customer feel better. It's not fixing any problem It's not fixing the problem of large fees and if problem of large fees becomes a lot more interesting because All these venues are getting advances from the ticketing company There are being reimbursed via these fees and then the fees are passed along to the customer And these fees are also there because the artists are asking for a larger and larger percentage of the gross and the promoter/vani, needs to make more money somewhere. So the fan is paying for it anyway, whether they're paying it up front or in the fee. So my personal feeling is we need to get rid of fees. And that doesn't mean get rid of the revenue that promoters are generating from them because they need them to stay in business. If an artist was making 85% of the gross, they probably need to make 78% of the gross now and drop the fee or whatever that percentage is. Yeah, that's amazing here and it comes from you as an artist manager. And I think we need more voices in the industry to say, hey, you know what? I'd rather take 75 and have an honest deal and have a great customer check out experience. Like I compliment you for that. I wonder if you're like the, you know, my sense is that you're a little rare in your willingness to do that. Yeah, so I'm absolutely rare in that. But what I will tell you is in speaking to Ford thinking managers and agents. It's a conversation that's starting to become normalized. Awesome. I know there was a conversation between some friends at the Niva conference last week where they were just going to start talking about fees. Doesn't mean they were going to get very far. I haven't talked to anyone who was in the conversation, but I set up to get some people, you know, from a high level to discuss kind of what we're talking about right now. And I think it would take years. And then there's also the question of, is it collusion for all the key players in the industry to make this decision that's ultimately good for the consumer? Or if all the companies get together and do this, that's really the law is getting. The laws get really tricky and bizarre where there could be some antitrust/collusion concerns if all the key players got together to make it better for the customer. It's a fascinating point. And I'm not the lawyer. I'm a classic podcast. Got you. I'm not the lawyer. But you're, I am going to go and make a pine on this. Go for it. You know, I think it'd be one thing. You know, I think the law would get triggered if all the agents simultaneously, like the whole industry simultaneously was like, we're not going to go below $28 a ticket and promoters agreed that, you know, I'm not going to win competitively with my neighbor by lowering a price below this level. If it's a matter of unfucking the deal and colliding to say like, hey, like, this is just providing more transparency. I don't think it, I don't think like the whole point is price control. I don't know. Again, maybe I shouldn't have been buying it. It depends on how it's rolled out. Yeah. What I'm going to say is it depends on how it's rolled out because let's say that AEG, Live Nation and Niva all get in a room together and say, you know, the agents. Yeah. I mean, yeah, already a little ridiculous, but this is what it would be. It's hard joke. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But this is how a change that's positive gets done is everybody says, we're now going to remove fees, but you're going to make a slightly smaller percentage of the gross. I don't know if it could work if just one company did it. Maybe it would work if one company did it and then others followed. But if all the companies decided that together that are on the buy side, which are promoters and pushed it downward, that would be collusion. So then if one organization does that, you know, like Niva, for instance, does that, is that collusion because they represent multiple promoters and venues. And if they did it independently, it would take forever. Yeah. So essentially, you know, it's funny. It's kind of like the, you know, there's ticketing deals that are already in place and they're going to take time to expire. But I think what you're doing here is pretty radical. You're proposing a solution to this. It's like if the 85% comes down to 75%, the ticketing fee can come down from 20% to 5% or whatever, because there's going to be credit card processing and a legitimate increase, you know, at some point there's a cost to transaction. It's a lot smaller than what the checkout is on ticket master. But ultimately, yeah. Yeah. But ultimately, the way I view this is the deals need to change in a way where everybody all the stakeholders are still making what they would have been making. So it's not about getting rid of fees and somebody's making more money. It's just rephrasing how the deal works. And I'll tell you the best part of this, if we as an industry could ever do this, we could eliminate fees on the primary side. The secondary market, you know, sub hubs of the world, if they eliminate fees, they're pretty much out of business. So it's a way to do significant both brand damage and structure of business that. And what is their complaint going to be when they go complain to the government that we got rid of fees on the primary side? What is our complaint going to be? Yeah, I said, what are the scalpers complaint when we get rid of fees? Because they always complain about everything. I don't know if they could find a valid complaint there. Yeah. Yeah. That's quite interesting. It's just such a fast ending point about this kind of reminds me of energy efficiency. Like the US is like, well, we could drop everything and get rid of oil and switch to electric. But then China's a way bigger consumer than us and India as well. So if we do it, but China doesn't do it, then it kind of reminds me of this whole, yeah. But someone needs to take the lead and just go for it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's no easy solutions. I mean, it's funny using your comparison you just gave. I heard Ted Cruz on CNBC a couple of weeks ago. And he's not someone I'm typically a fan of, but he was making a lot of sense where he was talking about AI legislation. And you know, some people may dramatically disagree with me and Ted Cruz on this, but his feeling was less regulation on AI and his reasoning I actually agree with, which is if we have significant AI regulation in the US, we know China is going to have no regulation on AI. And we want to be in a world and this was Ted Cruz's world, not mine, where China is building AI robots and militarizes them. And we do nothing because we're worried about regulating AI. And it doesn't, you know, it's an extreme. I don't agree with him across the board of this, but the big picture thought process, you know, carries over to the way the picketing is, you know, these are extreme issues that we need to reframe how we look at the entire issue. Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Well, we will see what happens. I'm glad we did the add on because it's just, minimally, it's a time to reflect and be like, holy shit, that changed one down and, you know, back to my original point, a domino has to the question is, is it hitting the next domino? Is it going to lead to mosaic or not? But I think I've had mixed reviews in the industry on whether, oh, this is, you know, this is something that is good and can lead to more or it's not so meaningful. And I personally would encourage people to feel optimistic right now. I mean, any progress right now is, is progress, frankly, in a space that has not had progress. And even for you, Randy, to say, hey, there's, there's a willingness for the, for artists to play their part and go down from 85 to 75. So as long as the fee comes down and it, it's the same thing, you know, like, I hope that conversation does happen at an industry level and you bring up a fascinating point that, how can that happen without, without collusion, my, and again, not a lawyer, but my god says that it's not actually like controlling the price in a negative way for consumers. So I hope, I hope you can get a room full of lawyers to have the conversation in a way that's not going to trigger some, you know, collusion issue. But anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm feeling optimistic and thank you for everything that you're doing and fighting the good fight and, and it's a big battle. It's a big war, if you will. But there is progress we made. There's battles being won, especially in Maine. The main thing is fascinating. Let's see it. I want to see if that, you know, inspires other states. I mean, that could be real, really interesting. What we have, we have Maryland that passed already. Maryland. And Maine. Oh, no, Maryland and Maine. We have. Okay. Yeah. So you know, Maryland and Maine, Minnesota has a better law than they had. New York didn't get completely bowed down. The legislators in New York, we used to be pro scalper, have changed sides and are against them now. Like, this is going to take years. This isn't going to be fixed overnight, but the tide has turned and the scalping industry is terrified because we have educated ourselves on their tools and their business approach and how they got the government on their side. And we are going to beat them and they're scared. So just know that it's, it's not going to happen quickly, but people are getting educated and with education, problems changes to laws. So I think if we regroup in three years from now, we'll be shocked where we're at. Interesting. Yeah. I love that. Let's plan on that by the way. I'll update you a calendar and buy it. Yeah. Perfect. June 38, 20, 28. By the way, it was my birthday yesterday. So we can. Well, that's. I'll be easy to remember. Yeah, we'll celebrate your birthday then, too. Happy birthday. Hopefully before I turn 40, this will all look completely different. Exactly. All right, man. Have a good one. Appreciate you. Yeah, great job to you. I'll see you next time.