Brazil has just written a national rulebook for how tickets are sold, and most of it is aimed at the primary seller, not the tout. Decree 13,108, signed by President Lula on 31 August and in force from 1 September, requires the full price with every fee shown from the first screen, locks the price once a buyer starts checkout, forces virtual queues to say how long the wait is, and gives every ticket holder the right to hand their ticket to someone else for free. A second decree makes free drinking water compulsory at any event expecting more than 1,000 people.
What the decree actually says
The ticketing decree covers box offices, websites and apps selling tickets to concerts, festivals and other live events, and it applies to resale marketplaces as well as first-hand sellers. Sport is carved out because Brazil regulates that under its separate sports law.
For primary sellers, the headline obligations are these. The total price, with every accessory fee itemised, has to appear from the buyer's first contact with the offer and stay visible through every step. Fees that duplicate another charge, or that do not correspond to a real service, can be treated as abusive, and sellers must keep records showing how each fee was calculated. Once a buyer selects a ticket and enters the pre-purchase stage, that ticket is held for long enough to complete the transaction, and during the hold neither the price nor the fees may move because a new tier opened, a batch sold out or a dynamic-pricing engine twitched. The buyer must be shown a countdown. Virtual queues must display the buyer's position, roughly how many people are ahead and an estimated wait. Sellers must deploy anti-bot technology, and high-demand onsales may use purchase limits, pre-registration and queues. Full refunds including fees are guaranteed when an event is cancelled, postponed or materially changed.
Then the clause that will travel furthest: a buyer who cannot attend has the right to transfer the ticket to another person at no charge. The transfer has to happen through the official ticketing platform, or a system it provides, so the issuer can update the ownership record and keep a traceable history. TheTicketingBusiness notes that most provisions took effect on publication, with the anti-bot, resale disclosure, reservation and transfer rules following 20 days later.
Resale platforms get their own list: display the total price from the start, require sellers to declare the original face value, tell buyers when a listing is above it, say whether the seller is a business or an individual, and state prominently on the home page and again before checkout that the site is not the official seller. What Brazil did not do is cap the resale price. It went for disclosure over ceilings, which is a different bet from Ontario, Vermont and the string of US states we have covered this year.
Why it is called the Taylor Swift Law
The nickname comes from the second decree. In November 2023 a 23-year-old fan, Ana Clara Benevides Machado, died after collapsing from heat exhaustion at an Eras Tour show in Rio de Janeiro, where the temperature reached 39 degrees and fans were not allowed to bring water into the stadium. Brazil imposed emergency water rules for the remaining dates at the time. The new decree makes those rules permanent and national: attendees may bring their own water containers, subject to reasonable material restrictions, and any event expecting more than 1,000 people has to provide free drinking water through fountains or individual containers in accessible spots.
What this means for event organisers
Most readers of this blog are not selling stadium shows in São Paulo. The reason to care is that Brazil has just written down, in law, a definition of a well-behaved checkout, and it reads like a procurement checklist for any registration platform.
On pricing and revenue transparency, the standard is now "total price from first contact, every fee named, nothing added without consent". The UK's Competition and Markets Authority reached the same place by guidance this summer, the US FTC by rule, and Brazil by decree. If your platform bolts a booking fee on at the last screen, that design is on borrowed time in three jurisdictions at once. It is also a quiet argument for pricing models that have no per-ticket fee to disclose in the first place: a platform bill that is the same at 500 tickets and 50,000 is a lot easier to display honestly than a percentage that only reveals itself in the basket.
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On the checkout itself, the price lock during reservation is the interesting engineering requirement. It means dynamic pricing and tiered release cannot reach into a basket that has already been opened. Any organiser using early-bird tiers should check what their platform does when a tier sells out while a buyer is mid-checkout, because "the price went up while I was typing my card number" is exactly the complaint Brazil has just made illegal.
On registration mechanics, the free-transfer right is a bigger operational change than it looks. Name changes and transfers are where most platforms make their fee income on secondary movement, and where organisers make their refund policy stick. Brazil says the buyer pays nothing, but also says the transfer must run through the issuer's own system so the record stays clean. That is a sensible middle: free for the fan, traceable for the door. For the record, eventcloud does not offer buyer-side ticket transfers. What exists is organiser-side: an organiser can change an attendee's name and email on the record from the dashboard, and the new details flow through to the badge and the check-in screen. If you want fans swapping tickets among themselves with no organiser in the loop, that is not what the product does.
Brazil did not cap what a ticket can resell for. It capped what a seller can hide.
The 1,000-person line
The water rule is worth a paragraph on its own, because it sets a hard attendance threshold that a lot of B2B events sit right on top of. A 1,200-delegate conference in a hot city is now, in Brazil, an event with a statutory obligation to provide free water, and a good many venues will start writing that into hire contracts elsewhere without waiting for a law. It is also a reminder of why organisers count heads so obsessively. Compliance thresholds, insurance bands, catering minimums and fire limits all key off registration numbers, which is one more reason the registration record has to be the single source of truth rather than a ticketing export reconciled against a spreadsheet the night before.
The wider pattern
Put Brazil next to the year's other rulings and a pattern shows. Regulators have stopped treating the tout as the only villain and started regulating the primary checkout: all-in pricing in the US, the UK and now Brazil; a German court ruling on FIFA's dark patterns in July; queue transparency and price locks in this decree. The direction of travel is that the buyer experience is becoming a compliance matter rather than a UX preference. Organisers choosing a platform in the next couple of years should ask the same questions Brazil just asked: is the full price visible before the basket, does the price move once I am in it, can a fan pass a ticket on without a toll, and does the record stay clean when they do. Platforms that can answer yes to all four will find the next regulation arrives as a shrug rather than a rebuild. You can see how eventcloud handles the registration record, badges and check-in on the registration page, and the flat per-user pricing that leaves no per-ticket fee to disclose on the pricing page.
