Photo Credit: Christian Lue
Time to rein in secondary ticketing marketplaces? A live sector coalition is demanding EU regulatory action to address “ticket resale abuse” on platforms including Viagogo and StubHub International.
That aptly named coalition, the Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing (FEAT), today urged enhanced ticket-resale regulations in an open letter. And said letter reached Michael McGrath, the EU consumer-protection commissioner who kicked off 2026 by identifying the in-the-works Digital Fairness Act (DFA) as a key focus area.
Capitalizing on this point, FEAT in its letter and release described current ticketing protections as inadequate and made the case for “quicker, easily enforceable takedown rules” under the DFA concerning “illegal” event-ticket listings.
As used here, “illegal” refers to listings for fake tickets as well as speculative tickets sold prior to official on-sales, besides listings that “otherwise break the promoter’s terms and conditions of entry.”
The way FEAT tells the story, platforms themselves have “frequently disregarded” formal complaints about these alleged fraudulent listings, which have also failed to elicit concrete follow-ups from regulators.
“A recent survey of FEAT members found that they had reported 296 listings, covering nearly 1,000 tickets, to unauthorised websites – with only one response. After escalating twenty separate complaints to regulators, only a handful of responses have been received, months after the concerts took place,” wrote FEAT, which rattled off letter signatories including Rammstein, Ed Sheeran manager Stuart Camp, and Ireland’s Big Day Out Festival.
“We need quicker, easily enforceable takedown rules; otherwise, event organisers will remain worse off than before the DSA [Digital Services Act] was conceived, as they spend time and resources on fruitless bureaucracy,” the entity proceeded.
Particularly given the EU’s affinity for regulatory action – from reviewing proposed buyouts to issuing massive fines and much in between – it’ll be worth tracking the Commission’s response from here.
Furthermore, the call for an EU resale crackdown has arrived against the backdrop of a not-so-favorable climate for ticketing platforms. Chief among the latter is, of course, Live Nation’s Ticketmaster, which is grappling with legal challenges in the States and the UK.
This leads to perhaps the most noteworthy element (or lack thereof) of FEAT’s letter and corresponding release: the conspicuous absence of Ticketmaster.
Hardly a stranger to criticism, the leading ticketing player is mentioned a grand total of zero times in the text, which hits the likes of Viagogo, StubHub International, Gigsberg, and Ticombo rather hard.
(One of the hard hits: a statement from Claire Turnham, the founder of “Victim of Viagogo,” railing against “industrial-scale ticket abuse.”)
“For years, platform operators with unfair and harmful business models have been taking advantage of our fans and customers,” European Festival Association (YOUROPE) chairman Christof Huber summed up.
“Yet we do not have the tools at our disposal to confront Viagogo and Co. in the way we would like to. As a representative of festivals across the continent, YOUROPE calls on the European Commission to act in the interest of those who guarantee millions in honest tax revenue and work for thousands of creative professionals and artists,” Huber concluded.
