StubHub's reputational problems continue to mount.

Already battered by negative headlines surrounding customer service failures tied to the FIFA World Cup and Coachella, the company is now facing a new wave of scrutiny after a CBC News investigation detailed CEO Eric Baker's ties to companies that both sell tickets on StubHub and finance professional ticket resellers using the platform.

The revelations raise significant ethical questions—and potentially more serious questions about corporate governance and disclosure.

In addition to serving as StubHub's CEO, Baker is the managing partner of Andro Capital, which, according to the company's SEC filings, sells ticket inventory on StubHub. Those same filings also reveal that Andro is affiliated with Colloquy Capital, a financing company that provides short-term loans to ticket brokers secured by expected proceeds from future StubHub ticket sales.

The relationship isn't new. Music manager, activist and frequent Decibel & Docket podcast guest Randy Nichols first raised questions about Andro Capital during a California Assembly hearing in April and expanded on those concerns during Decibel's July 3 podcast. Together, Andro and Colloquy create a vertically integrated resale operation in which Baker potentially profits from both the sale of tickets and the financing of those sales, all within a marketplace he oversees.

That creates an obvious conflict.

As CEO of a public company, Baker has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of StubHub and its shareholders. The central question is whether decisions are being made to maximize StubHub's value or Andro's. Today those interests may align. But what happens if regulators require StubHub to crack down on professional resellers or restrict speculative ticket listings? Suddenly, the interests of StubHub and Baker's private investment firm could diverge dramatically.

And that's only one potential conflict.

According to the company's filings, Andro has generated millions of dollars in ticket sales through StubHub. That naturally raises questions about how Andro acquires such a large inventory of tickets. Does it purchase directly from teams, promoters or other rights holders? Does it buy inventory from brokers already operating on StubHub before reselling those tickets at higher prices? Does it use bots or employ other large-scale acquisition strategies? Whatever the answer, the fact that StubHub's CEO is operating one of the platform's major sellers is likely to invite increased regulatory scrutiny.

The relationship with Colloquy Capital raises an entirely separate set of concerns.

StubHub's S-1 states that the company entered into an agreement with Colloquy to offer financing to sellers secured by future StubHub receivables. StubHub also helped administer repayment by withholding a portion of sellers' proceeds before remitting the balance.

That makes Colloquy far more than a passive investment.

According to the filings, StubHub was effectively helping originate and administer financing business for a company affiliated with its own CEO. That arrangement raises questions about Baker's duty of loyalty to shareholders by creating circumstances where his personal financial interests could influence corporate decisions.

It also raises broader questions about whether StubHub operates as the neutral marketplace it claims to be.

For years, StubHub has described itself as "the leading marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets." But if Baker is simultaneously acting as a major reseller while financing other professional resellers, the company's longstanding portrayal of itself as a neutral intermediary becomes much harder to reconcile with reality.

It didn't take long for plaintiffs' lawyers to act.

New York attorney Hillel Parness recently filed what appears to be the first lawsuit centered on Baker's relationship with Andro, bringing the case on behalf of a consumer who purchased tickets to both a Major League Soccer match and a KISS concert.

According to the complaint:

"Plaintiff purchased on both occasions on the belief, induced by Defendants' marketing, that the tickets were being resold by individual fans through a neutral marketplace, and Plaintiff would not have purchased at the prices paid—or at all—had Plaintiff known that Defendant StubHub's CEO held a financial interest in, and StubHub itself helped finance, the professional resale operation(s) supplying much of the platform's inventory."

The complaint further alleges:

"Had Plaintiff and members of the Class known of this conflict of interest, they would not have purchased tickets on StubHub, or would not have paid the prices they paid, or would have sought tickets through an alternative source."

The proposed class action alleges fraudulent concealment, negligent misrepresentation, violations of state consumer protection laws, unjust enrichment, and breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

StubHub has offered little beyond a familiar defense.

Asked about the apparent contradiction between its marketing as a neutral marketplace and Baker's ownership interests, a company spokesperson told CBC News that the Baker-Andro relationship "has been fully disclosed in StubHub's public SEC filings, and we don't have anything to add beyond what is in those filings."

Regarding the newly filed lawsuit, StubHub has so far declined to comment.

That response leaves the central allegations largely unanswered.

StubHub is not disputing Baker's ownership interest in Andro, Colloquy's financing relationship with sellers, or StubHub's role in administering those loans. Instead, the company's defense rests on the fact that those relationships were disclosed in securities filings.

The lawsuit argues that disclosure to investors are not the same as disclosure to consumers. An institutional investor reading an S-1 is not the same audience as a fan buying two tickets online. Plaintiffs argue that consumers never learned about Baker's financial interests through StubHub's marketing, checkout process, or terms presented during a purchase.

That distinction could become central to the litigation.

The timing could hardly be worse.

StubHub went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025, raising approximately $758 million at $23.50 per share. Since then, the stock has declined sharply, prompting separate shareholder litigation alleging the company misled investors about its financial condition prior to the IPO—allegations StubHub denies.

The Andro revelations add another layer to an already challenging legal environment.

Consumer Protection BC and the Texas Attorney General were already investigating StubHub's practices following widespread World Cup ticket problems. The company previously settled California's 2022 drip-pricing lawsuit and later faced enforcement action from the District of Columbia attorney general over similar pricing practices.

Viewed together, the cases paint a broader picture in which StubHub's public messaging increasingly appears disconnected from the disclosures contained in its regulatory filings.

Industry estimates suggest professional ticket brokers account for roughly 70 to 80 percent of inventory listed on the largest resale marketplaces. If StubHub's marketplace resembles the broader secondary market, Baker's dual role isn't a peripheral conflict—it sits near the center of the platform's business model.

The proposed class action excludes claims involving tickets that were canceled, never delivered or invalidated. Those claims are proceeding separately, including in Moghal v. StubHub, meaning the World Cup litigation and the Andro conflict-of-interest litigation are advancing on parallel tracks.

StubHub will likely continue arguing that its SEC filings fully disclosed Baker's relationships. Plaintiffs, meanwhile, are expected to argue that disclosure to investors does not satisfy obligations owed to consumers purchasing tickets on the platform.

The larger risk for Baker may not be the class action itself.

Discovery could provide regulators with a detailed roadmap of how StubHub's marketplace operates and whether the company's structure creates conflicts between the interests of consumers, shareholders and its chief executive. A CEO who profits from both operating a marketplace and participating in it as a major seller presents exactly the kind of structural conflict that increasingly attracts regulatory attention.

Attorneys for Condé Nast likely violated a confidentiality agreement with Pitchfork Music Festival founder Mike Reed when they made public details of an AAA arbitration hearing and depositions with the Chicago promoter, sources tell Decibel.

The disclosures, made in a last-minute lawsuit the media company filed in federal court on July 6, could result in legal sanctions against the publisher, sources say, and threaten to derail months of private arbitration between Condé Nast and Reed's company as the two sides worked to quietly wind down the festival.

On November 11, 2024, the Anna Wintour-affiliated media company announced it was canceling the festival after more than 20 years of successfully staging Pitchfork at Union Park in Chicago.

The demise of Pitchfork is the latest example of why major festivals and legacy media companies — especially print brands pivoting toward live events — are a bad match. It's a counterintuitive failure, because festivals and magazines look like the same platform: a place where a handful of marquee names draw the crowd while the undercard gets the exposure it needs to build a career. But the jobs, the business models, and the incentives underneath that surface resemblance don't line up. Media executives tend to view live events as a cash infusion for balance sheets strained by the collapse of print advertising. The reality is different — most media companies don't understand the festivals they're buying, and their ownership tends to accelerate whatever problems the event already had.

I'd know. I worked at one of the largest media companies to attempt a serious expansion into the festival business — Penske Media. I'm not violating my non-disparagement agreement with Penske when I say its track record in live music speaks for itself. In 2022, Penske launched LA3C (Los Angeles, Capital of Culture & Creativity), a music, food, and art festival built around a stated vision of growing into a live brand that would complement the 2028 Olympics. It lasted two years. That same year, Penske bought Life Is Beautiful, arguably one of the better-curated indie festivals in North America; it too was canceled after two more seasons. And during the pandemic, Penske took majority control of South by Southwest, with Rolling Stone and Billboard positioned to help expand the brand globally. Instead, the number of bands performing at the Austin flagship event was cut roughly in half by 2022.

The instinct inside a media company that's just bought a festival is almost always the same: find the redundancies and cut them. Media is a tight-margin business, and when a publisher takes over an event, the people who look most expendable on an org chart — production, booking, site design — are usually the first let go. The core festival staff might survive for a season or two, on borrowed time, before those functions get folded into the magazine's existing executive bench. That's where the trouble starts, because those jobs aren't actually adjacent to each other. They just look that way from a distance.

Booking is the clearest case. An entertainment executive who's spent a career landing artists for cover shoots and sit-down interviews is operating in a world of publicists, embargoes, and a single day of access. Festival booking is a different discipline entirely: it's routing logic across a touring calendar, agent relationships built over a decade, deposits and force majeure clauses, and a genuine feel for which artist at which slot sells 20,000 tickets versus which one just sounds good on paper. A magazine can put an artist on the cover because a publicist likes the story angle. A festival can't put an artist on a headlining slot because an editor likes them — the math either supports the guarantee or it doesn't, and that math is unforgiving in a way editorial decisions rarely are.

Sponsorship sales have the same problem wearing a different costume. Selling a page of display advertising or a branded content package is not the same job as selling a festival activation, and treating them as interchangeable is one of the most consistent mistakes media buyers make. The inventory is different — a footprint on a festival ground, a naming-rights deal, a VIP tent — and so are the deliverables, the on-site execution risk, and what the client expects to walk away with. A magazine advertiser wants reach and brand safety. A festival sponsor wants activation, foot traffic, and a specific kind of cultural cachet that has to be earned on the ground, not bought in a media kit. "It takes a few years to learn the job and adjust," one executive and fellow comiserator reminded me during a recent conversation — and that's precisely the runway media companies rarely give the people they've inherited before deciding the festival's underlying business is broken rather than the staffing plan that just replaced it.

There's also a structural mismatch in how the two businesses are supposed to perform. Magazines are built for predictable, recurring revenue smoothed across a fiscal year. Festivals are a single, weather-dependent weekend where the majority of the annual P&L clears or doesn't clear in 72 hours, and the cost structure — talent deposits, insurance, city permits, union labor — is locked in months before a single ticket sale confirms the bet. Media executives accustomed to adjusting a content calendar mid-quarter are unprepared for a business where the biggest decisions of the year are irreversible by March. And because publishing leadership tends to rotate every few years, the festival is repeatedly handed to someone new who has to relearn, from scratch, relationships with agents and vendors that took the previous regime years to build. Media companies have found real success layering B2B conferences or a literary event like the LA Times' Festival of Books onto an existing brand — formats that lean on editorial credibility rather than large-scale talent buying and site logistics. Music festivals are a different animal, and the industry's recent history — Penske's, and now Condé Nast's with Pitchfork — suggests that's not a coincidence.

Condé Nast's federal lawsuit against Reed's production company shows how far apart the two sides have drifted since the publisher pulled the plug on Pitchfork 2025, after having agreed at the close of the 2024 festival to move forward. At issue is roughly $564,000 in funds Reed says were needed to wind down the canceled 2025 event — costs he describes as the kind that "outlive day-to-day operations," including refunds, vendor obligations, tax filings, and recordkeeping, in a statement provided to Decibel.

"Those duties don't vanish overnight," Reed wrote. "When Condé Nast, a global media conglomerate, gave us about 90 minutes' notice that it was ending the Chicago festival, months of work remained to responsibly wrap up the 2024 event, and planning for 2025 — with its own costs and obligations — was already underway."

Reed said he tried to negotiate the wind-down directly with the publisher, but that "Condé Nast complicated the process by terminating all the Pitchfork festival staff and original e-zine team who had historically handled these issues, removing exactly the people who could have helped make this a routine, professional wind-down discussion."

Condé Nast's attorney, Joshua Harris, claims Reed improperly transferred Pitchfork funds from a shared account into one he controlled, but the complaint doesn't specify how that transfer violated the working agreement between Reed and the publisher. Harris also conflates two separate points of agreement — conflating Reed's sign-off on how the cancellation was publicly messaged with an agreement on how the festival's finances would be wound down. Reed disputed the financial plan explicitly, telling the media company as much in a January 9, 2025 email that, per Reed, noted the remaining costs were incurred and attributable to the canceled 2025 event and the wind-down of all operations. Harris argues some of the costs Reed detailed in that email hadn't yet been incurred — implying, without quite saying so, that they therefore didn't need to be paid.

A large portion of Harris's civil complaint is also devoted to disputing evidence introduced during arbitration and depositions between the two parties — proceedings that remain both ongoing and confidential.

"Since this dispute arose many months ago, we have followed the arbitration procedure that Condé Nast itself selected, consistently showing up at the table, producing documents, sitting for depositions, and preparing for a hearing that is now set," Reed said in a statement to Decibel. "But instead of letting that agreed process reach a conclusion, Condé Nast has now launched last-minute, parallel litigation that looks like an end-around designed to increase pressure rather than to fairly resolve what is, at bottom, a dispute about how to share the real costs of winding down a long-running festival partnership."

Trouble started for Pitchfork roughly a year after Condé Nast closed its purchase of the site from founders Ryan Schreiber and Chris Kaskie at the end of 2015. A VIP section added in 2017 was widely considered a disaster among insiders. "VIP sections at Pitchfork became tented fraternities soaked in vodka lemonade, obstructing stage views for plebeian fans now relegated thirty yards from stage right or left," Dylan Weinert wrote for Newcity in a 2025 article on the festival's demise.

Condé Nast leadership kept pushing harder on sponsorship deals and VIP packages. Then the festival was split off from the publication entirely and given its own P&L and org chart, and Reed came under pressure to book more mainstream acts than a 25,000-person festival could realistically support. "As Condé continued to reshape the festival into a standalone product, its profitability declined," Weinert wrote. "From 2017 on, after more than a decade of success, the festival lost money."

In January 2024, half of Pitchfork's writing staff was laid off and the site was merged into GQ. After the 2024 edition wrapped, Reed was told the next one was greenlit, with plans to build the 2025 festival around its twentieth anniversary — an obvious hook, as Weinert put it. The vision, according to what Reed told WBEZ, was a lineup that looked both backward and forward: early Pitchfork alumni now playing amphitheaters, like Bon Iver and St. Vincent, alongside a newer generation of artists shaped by their influence.

Reed got to work. The team booked talent, filed permits with the Chicago Park District, and locked in vendors, staging, and lighting. Then, on November 11, the rug was pulled: Condé told him the festival was canceled, no explanation given. With no festival left to produce, Reed was out. Ninety minutes later, the announcement was live on Instagram.

Condé Nast's statement read, in part: "As the music festival landscape continues to evolve rapidly, we have made the difficult decision not to host Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago in 2025." The rest of the announcement offered platitudes to fans of the publication and the festival, along with vague, tepid promises that Pitchfork would explore event programming in the future.

Mike Reed remains ambitious. He's launching the first edition of Sound & Gravity, a multi-venue event featuring 48 artists across six venues, all within walking distance of one another, scheduled for September 11 through 13 — a reimagining of what a live music festival can look like, and worth penciling in for Pitchfork fans still nursing the loss.

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Ringo Starr is heading back to one of the most significant venues of his career.

The former Beatles drummer announced 10 East Coast dates for a fall run with his long-running All Starr Band, highlighted by an Oct. 1 performance at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York—his first appearance at the venue since The Beatles played two sold-out concerts there on Aug. 28 and 29, 1964. Those performances are widely regarded as the band's first stadium concerts, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of large-scale rock touring.

The newly announced leg begins Sept. 24 at the State Theatre in Easton, Pennsylvania, and concludes Oct. 7 at the Palace Theater in Albany, New York. Stops include Bethel Woods in New York, PNC Bank Arts Center in New Jersey, The Anthem in Washington, D.C., MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston, Cross Insurance Arena in Portland, Maine, Toyota Oakdale Theatre in Connecticut and American Music Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

"We just finished a Spring tour which ended at the Greek," Starr said in a statement. "It was all so great—the audiences were so loving, and I just love playing with this band. I'm really looking forward to these Fall shows. See you in September—Peace and love, Ringo."

The 2026 edition of the All Starr Band features longtime guitarist Steve Lukather of Toto alongside Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Hamish Stuart, Gregg Bissonette and Buck Johnson. Since launching the revolving-supergroup concept in 1989, Starr has built the All Starr Band around a simple formula: each musician performs both Ringo classics and hits from their own catalogs, creating a set packed with familiar songs spanning several decades of rock.

The fall dates follow a successful spring outing that concluded with a sold-out performance at Los Angeles' Greek Theatre in June.

The announcement comes during a busy stretch for Starr. On July 7, his 86th birthday, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer will once again invite fans around the world to participate in his annual "Peace & Love" campaign by saying, thinking or posting "Peace & Love" at noon local time. Starr has celebrated his birthday this way since 2008, with fan-organized events now taking place around the globe.

He's also promoting Long Long Road, his 22nd solo studio album and second collaboration with producer T Bone Burnett. The 10-song collection follows 2025's Look Up and features guest appearances from Sheryl Crow, Sarah Jarosz, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and St. Vincent.

For the live business, the Forest Hills booking is particularly noteworthy. While the venue has enjoyed a resurgence over the past decade as one of New York's premier outdoor concert destinations, Starr's return provides a direct connection to one of the defining moments in concert history. The Beatles' 1964 appearances at Forest Hills helped demonstrate the commercial potential of stadium-scale rock performances, paving the way for the arena and stadium touring business that would emerge over the following decades.