A Vanderbilt University white paper published on 25 August wants two things written into American law: no ticket resold above face value, and a hard 10% ceiling on the processing fees online ticketing platforms charge. Its authors put the combined saving to audiences at up to $11bn a year. Of that total, $6.8bn is platform fees. Only $4.5bn is scalpers.
What the paper actually proposes
The paper is called How to Save Audiences $11 Billion on Live Events and it comes from the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, written by Brian Shearer, its director of competition and regulatory policy and formerly assistant director of policy planning and strategy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Two recommendations, both blunt.
First, ban the resale of any ticket above its face value. The paper argues this preserves genuine peer-to-peer resale, the person who bought two and can now only use one, while removing the economics that make professional broking viable at all.
Second, cap the processing fees charged by online ticketing platforms at 10%. The framing is deliberately modest: a cap lets platforms stay in business while putting a ceiling on what "reasonable" means. It was reported on 26 August and picked up the same week by Digital Music News.
Where the $11bn comes from
The split is the interesting part and almost nobody has quoted it. Corporate ticket brokers add an estimated $4.5bn a year in resale upcharges. Ticketing platforms charging service fees add a further $6.8bn. The National Independent Talent Organisation, whose executive director Nathaniel Marro was quoted supporting the findings, and the National Independent Venue Association have both backed the recommendations. The paper notes it is not proposing anything exotic: Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont have already legislated in this direction.
The number a B2B organiser should read twice
If you run conferences and trade shows rather than arena tours, you have probably filed this under "concert industry problem". Reconsider. The scalping half genuinely does not apply to you, because nobody is running bots against your 900-delegate summit. The other $6.8bn is a straight percentage of ticket revenue collected by ticketing platforms, and that arithmetic works identically whether the ticket is a $60 gig or a $600 conference pass.
The scalpers get the headlines. The larger half of the bill is being written by the platforms selling the tickets in the first place, and it is charged in the same way to a stadium and to a regional trade show.
What a 10% cap would mean at your ticket price
Here is the part the coverage skipped: run the proposed 10% ceiling against what the major platforms actually charge today. The table below shows the total platform take, service fee plus card processing where they are charged separately, as a percentage of face value at three ticket prices. Rates are current published US rates.
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| Platform and fee basis | $20 ticket | $50 ticket | $200 ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite, 3.7% plus $1.79 service, plus 2.9% processing | 15.6% | 10.2% | 7.5% |
| Humanitix, 5% plus $1.29, card processing included | 11.5% | 7.6% | 5.6% |
| Ticket Tailor, $0.85 per ticket, plus 2.9% plus $0.30 processing | 8.7% | 5.2% | 3.5% |
| eventcloud, flat subscription, no per-ticket fee | 0% platform | 0% platform | 0% platform |
The eventcloud row needs its footnote said out loud rather than buried: the platform take is zero because the charge is a flat $125 per user per month, and card processing is still charged by Stripe directly to the organiser at Stripe's own rates. Zero per-ticket fee is not zero cost. It is a different bill.
Why a flat-plus-percentage fee is quietly regressive
Read across the top row and the pattern is unmistakable. Eventbrite takes 15.6% of a $20 ticket and 7.5% of a $200 one. That is not a quirk. Any fee built as a percentage plus a fixed amount per ticket punishes cheap tickets hardest, because the fixed component is a much larger slice of a small number.
Which means a 10% cap, written as the paper proposes it, would bite hardest on exactly the events that can least afford it: community fundraisers, student societies, small festivals and anyone selling a $15 door ticket. The stadium selling $250 seats is already comfortably inside the ceiling. If a legislature adopts this, the platforms most exposed are the ones serving the smallest organisers, and the likely response is a floor charge rather than a lower percentage.
What happens next, realistically
Nothing quickly. It is a policy paper, not a bill, and the recent record is mixed: California's resale cap died in committee earlier this month, while Vermont's took effect in July. The face-value half will get the lobbying attention because StubHub and the resale platforms have a business to defend. The fee-cap half will get less noise and would, if it passed, matter more to more organisers.
The useful thing to do while the argument runs is to find out where you actually sit. Work out your own platform's take as a percentage of face value at your real ticket price, not at a round number, and see whether a 10% ceiling would change your bill by a cent. If your platform charges a percentage of every ticket, the answer depends on what you charge for a seat. If it charges a flat subscription, the answer is no, which is the whole point of the distinction. Our pricing page shows the flat figure and the Eventbrite comparison runs the same event through both models.
