Kid Rock joins Trump in the White House—watch out, Ticketmaster
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday aimed at ending price gouging for live-entertainment tickets, with musician Kid Rock at his side in the Oval Office wearing a bright red, white, and blue bejeweled suit.
“Anyone who’s bought a concert ticket in the last decade, maybe 20 years—no matter what your politics are—knows that it’s a conundrum,” Kid Rock told reporters. Trump said while he didn’t know much about price gouging, “I checked it out, and it is a big problem.”
For decades, musicians have been feuding with ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster over the high fees they pass on to fans, going back to 1995 when Pearl Jam canceled their tour after a dispute with Ticketmaster, over what they said were excessive and unfair fees.
Here’s what to know about the new executive order.
What does the executive order do?
The executive order is designed to stop “price-gouging by middlemen” and orders the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ensure “price transparency at all stages of the ticket-purchase process” and work with Attorney General Pam Bondi to better enforce the 2016 Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act against companies and individuals demonstrating unfair, deceptive, and anti-competitive conduct, like using bots to buy concert tickets in bulk and then resell them.
It comes after the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment last May, arguing their monopoly over live events in the U.S. has eliminated competition and driven up ticket prices.
Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and Golden State Warriors fans also experienced price gouging
Another notable price-gouging case occurred in 2015 when ticket seller StubHub sued rival Ticketmaster and the Golden State Warriors basketball team, arguing they unfairly required fans to resell game tickets on Ticketmaster’s platform, which increased ticket prices.
However, the most publicized example is when Ticketmaster fumbled pre-ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in 2022, after the site crashed, leaving users logged out or frozen and causing Swifties hours of frustration as they attempted and failed to buy tickets. (In 2023, those tickets eventually reached between $11,000 to $22,500.)
On Monday, Lady Gaga fans experienced something similar as they attempted to buy tickets for her highly anticipated The Mayhem Ball tour, when dynamic pricing, which raises prices in real time, drove tickets sky high with the help of bots and resellers. Now, many angry “little monsters” (the name given to Lady Gaga fans) are weighing whether to shell out thousands of dollars to see their favorite artist.
Angry fans took to social media, where one X user complained that tickets for Lady Gaga’s New York show were already “$1,770 for good lower-level tickets. . . . Just disgusting.” Meanwhile, another X user recalled Ticketmaster’s most infamous fiasco: “Like be for real . . . £1066 to be front row . . . like what in the Taylor Swift are these prices!?”