A new white paper out of Vanderbilt University is giving fresh ammunition to the years-long push to regulate the secondary ticket market, and this time the number attached to the problem is big enough to be hard to ignore: $11 billion a year.
The paper, titled "How to Save Audiences $11 Billion on Live Events," comes from the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator (VPA), a research center focused on translating academic work into workable policy. Released this month, it argues that two forces are draining billions from fans every year — corporate ticket brokers who mark up tickets on the resale market, and ticketing platforms whose service fees stack on top of both primary and secondary sales. According to the report, brokers account for an estimated $4.5 billion in resale upcharges annually, while platform service fees add another $6.8 billion. Combined, that's more than $11 billion pulled out of fans' pockets every year — money the report's authors say never reaches the artists, crews, or venues actually staging the shows.
The paper pushes back directly on one of the resale industry's longest-standing talking points: that secondary marketplaces save consumers money by letting tickets trade below face value when demand is soft. VPA's data tells a different story. By the report's accounting, for every dollar fans save on a below-face-value resale, they lose roughly twelve dollars to markup gouging elsewhere in the market. That framing is likely to be the paper's most quoted stat in the coming weeks, since it's a direct rebuttal to the "market efficiency" defense that companies like StubHub have leaned on for years in testimony before Congress and in comments to regulators.
