Washington, D.C. has passed a bill that will cap the resale of live entertainment tickets at 10% of their original price and ban so-called surveillance pricing. The D.C. Council approved the bill, known as the Restricting Egregious Scalping Against Live Entertainment (RESALE) Act, unanimously on Tuesday, which includes several different components intended to protect fans from ticket scalpers. One aspect of the bill is a strict limit that bans resellers from charging more than 10% of the ticket’s face value. The bill also requires the original seller to advertise the full cost of the ticket, including any fees that might be tacked on later. The concept, known as “all-in” pricing, became a focus of the FTC during President Joe Biden’s tenure in the early 2020s and is something that’s currently being pursued in New York by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The bill also bans the use of any technology that allows resellers to purchase mass quantities of tickets above stated limits from the original seller. Resellers who sell 50 or more tickets per year would also need to register with the District, according to the legislation, and become bonded.
The ban on surveillance pricing in the D.C. bill means that sellers can’t use personal information collected about a given consumer to adjust the price of tickets. Surveillance pricing, sometimes referred to as personalized pricing, means that some people are being charged different prices for the same ticket based on information like demographics or behavior. Instacart, for example, was recently caught charging almost 25% more for identical food items, though the company says it was just an experiment that it’s no longer conducting.
