This started on Tuesday.
Randy Nichols drew a comparison between bootleggers and ticket brokers. (As the grandson of a famous Georgia bootlegger, I took no offense.)
“The carry inventory, risk, need to deal with forecasting,” he wrote. “But at the end of the day, they aren’t a partner. They’re stealing.”
Josh Ludwig jumped on that immediately.
“You’re my friend…I love ya but that comparison is lazy and dishonest,” he replied. “Bootleggers sell counterfeit and unauthorized goods. Brokers sell legitimate tickets in a legal marketplace. Huge difference.”
Josh is wrong about bootleggers. It is just about illegal liquor. My grandfather made excellent moonshine. A legend in rural Georgia.
I kid. Urban Dictionary sums up bootlegging in modern terms the best: “Fake ass imitations of something authentic.”
(Josh also sent me a 6-pack of Mac and Jack’s African Amber during COVID. So, I am letting this slide.)
Josh laid out his case.
“They take real pricing risk, carry inventory, absorb losses when demand is soft, and help move tickets when primary pricing misses the mark. You can hate brokers all you want, but comparing legitimate resale to parking lot bootlegs just proves you’re attacking the existence of the market, not making a serious argument about how it actually works.”
I watched this go down in our Talking Tickets Slack Channel.
Then I thought: I can use this as a teaching and learning moment for all of us.
Josh’s Case
Josh lays out the standard broker defense.
It’s refined. Developed over decades. The quality of the argument depends on your beliefs.
“They take real pricing risk, carry inventory, absorb losses when demand is soft, and help move tickets when primary pricing misses the mark.”
Josh makes his argument in good faith. But let’s see what is missing.
On Risk:
Brokers do take risks.
Real money, months in advance. No guarantees.
This is calculated risk.
Bets are placed based on data, relationships, and instinct. Sometimes there are huge payoffs.
Sometimes there are big losses.
Walking away may happen, but that’s usually speculative orders.
Once capital is committed, the loss is on the brokers.
On Inventory:
Brokers do carry inventory.
Whose inventory?
How did they get it?
Brokers access inventory through means that fans can’t compete with:
- Bots that jam public onsales…bypassing ticket limits in milliseconds.
- Presale codes meant for superfans, bought or scraped at scale.
- Fan club allocations designed for loyalty, funneled to resale.
- Relationships with box offices, season ticket holders, and insiders.
The Eras tour made this visible.
The public onsales weren’t safe zones. They were war zones. Bots flooded the zone.
This stops being about who wants a ticket. It becomes who has the fastest software, the best data, and the right connections.
On Losses:
Brokers take a loss.
True.
But losses are the cost of playing the game. They’re not charity.
They are the price of admission to a system that rewards those who can predict demand better than the primary market or who are willing to make a bet on a show that might pick up.
On Helping Move Tickets:
This is the most seductive part of Josh’s argument. If it were 2004, I might buy it.
It sounds like a public service. Customer service. Brokers as market-makers. Providing liquidity. Keeping the ecosystem healthy.
“Help move tickets when primary pricing misses the mark.”
Let’s think about this…
Primary pricing misses the mark. True.
But is it an accident? Or is it by design?
Teams underprice to create buzz. Artists hold back inventory to capture demand at different points. Venues price some seats low to allow accessibility.
The “miss” isn’t a mistake. It is a strategy. A choice.
Brokers aren’t fixing pricing errors. They are exploiting intentional gaps.
My question:
If your pricing consistently misses the mark, why is the mark the problem?
I don’t think the problem is that brokers exist. I think that the system is so broken that it makes exploitation too attractive to pass up.
This brings me back to the final claim…
The Free Market Argument:
Or as I like to call it, “Chicago School Brain Rot.”
You may buy the free market myth. I don’t.
But let’s say you do. A true free market needs transparency, equal access, and no artificial scarcity.
None of these exist in tickets.
Fans don’t know what’s available. Brokers have bots and relationships. The primary market creates scarcity as a marketing tactic.
This isn’t a free market. It’s a rigged game.
Randy Nichol’s: The Critic
Randy saw Josh’s defense and didn’t flinch.
“We will always go after CTF or NATB when they attack dynamic or platinum,” he said. “Both these tools exist for one reason only: to try and bring some of the value they were extracting back to the artists.”
Randy’s point is structural.
For years, brokers captured value that belonged to someone else. Now that the primary market is fighting back, the broker trade groups want to complain about the tactics.
“An organization built to protect the right to mark up ticket prices seems like a strange place to hear complaints about marking up tickets from.”
Let’s look at Randy’s argument piece by piece.
On the Bootlegger Comparison:
Randy called brokers bootleggers. It was an insult.
Bootleggers in my grandfather’s day weren’t stealing. They were working.
My grandfather fought in WWII. Won a chest full of medals. Came home to rural Georgia. The counties were dry. Jobs were scarce. Poverty was the default. He had a family to raise.
The parallel isn’t perfect. Nothing is.
Here’s what sticks with me: when a system creates scarcity someone will figure out how to meet the demand.
This doesn’t make the person a villain. It’s sometimes someone that saw an opportunity and needed to take it.
Randy’s analogy cuts both ways.
Bringing Back Value:
Dynamic pricing returns value to artists. True.
It also returns value to Ticketmaster. To teams. To venues.
Everyone wants their cut.
The question isn’t whether value is captured. It’s who captures the value and what do they do with it.
Hypocrisy:
This is Randy’s strongest point.
If your business model is built on markups, complaining about someone else’s markup is a tough look.
Is it hypocrisy? Is it competition?
Every business marks up. The difference is where the money ends up.
When Ticketmaster marks up, the money goes to artists and rights holders. When brokers markup, the money flows to…brokers.
We can argue about margins. Fairness. Who is adding value.
We can’t argue about the direction of the flow.
That’s not hypocrisy. It is a disagreement about where value belongs.
Primary v. Secondary:
Randy doesn’t assume a moral hierarchy.
Primary good. Secondary bad.
He’s much more nuanced than this argument might lead you to believe.
But the key is that the primary market isn’t innocent.
It holds back inventory. It partners with brokers in private while condemning them in public.
Here’s the part that sticks with so many people. The part that makes many folks feel like this whole thing is a performance:
Ticketmaster does both.
Primary and secondary. Same platform. Many times, the same seats.
That’s the business model.
It isn’t a secret.
The DOJ’s case against Live Nation partly hangs on this. The thesis seems to be that when one company controls most of the primary market and also controls the largest secondary marketplace…where does one end and the other begin?
Fans don’t know. Artists don’t know. Regulators…they are trying to figure it out.
But it ain’t easy.
That’s the point.
I wouldn’t say that the line between primary and secondary is necessarily a moral boundary. Though that may impact some of my thinking.
It isn’t even a clean legal one any longer.
Right now, it is PR. A way to say one thing, but do another.
As I remind you: strategy is what you do not what you say.
Where Do I Fit In?
I enjoyed this debate. It was happening in the Slack Channel I set up to encourage back-and-forth like this.
I was amused by the bootlegger stuff. Nodded at the structural arguments.
Then, I took a moment to reflect on my history.
People know the outlines of my experience in tickets:
- The Black Card
- College and pro sports
- Seattle Theatre Group
- Broadway
People may not appreciate the experiences I had in the secondary market.
I wasn’t the kind of guy who would buy 100 tickets to Taylor Swift, post them on the internet, and talk about my “value” to the ecosystem.
I was the kind of broker who had a book of business. The ultimate VVIP list of clients.
Names you’d know. CEOs. CMOs. VPs of sales. Celebrities.
I was their guy.
These people would call my line, get me, a real person. I’d know what was going on in their lives. I’d know what they were buying and why. I’d make suggestions that carried weight.
To these people, they weren’t mere suggestions…they were facts.
And I’d charge a premium for that.
That business doesn’t really exist now.
Millions of dollars in sales every year, one call, email, or text at a time.
In the current debate, I have ethical concerns that others don’t.
The current business built on deception, platforms, and lack of human contact is something I don’t want to do…so I don’t.
But I do know that brokers have created value, lots of it, up and down the chain…for decades.
Box offices. Producers. Shows. Fans. VIPs. Everyone benefited.
Not in every transaction, but across the whole it was a less extractive, more symbiotic system.
Where do I land today?
I don’t always know.
But I know these debates will continue. And they matter.
Why?
The system has changed.
It moved from relationships to platforms. From phone calls to APIs. From “I was their guy” to “Can you match the price I saw on StubHub?”
Value used to be exchanged between people who knew each other.
Now it’s just code. Hidden language in terms of service agreements that the average person can’t possibly understand. Collected by companies that don’t know your name…and don’t really care.
Is that more efficient? Maybe.
Is it more alienating? Certainly.
Right Here. Right Now.
I don’t think brokers are villains. I don’t think the primary market is pure.
I think the system was designed to create tension. Everyone plays a part.
My grandfather made moonshine because the system offered nothing else.
I built a VVIP business because the system gave me an opportunity.
My customers bought from me. They knew where the product came from. They knew the risk. They made a choice.
I wasn’t the only choice. Just the one they determined was the best.
Today fans don’t have that choice. They buy a ticket. They don’t know if the price is fair. They don’t know who to blame when everything feels more and more expensive.
They have to pay.
That’s not a market. That’s a trap.
The “just don’t go” crowd has an answer for this. Don’t like the price? Stay home.
Sounds reasonable, yeah? It’s not.
It assumes attendance is optional. Luxury. Nice-to-have. Like we are just here to work and sleep. Work and sleep.
Live events aren’t luxuries. They are how we mark time. How we connect. How we remember.
How many of your most cherished memories are live events?
Telling someone to stay home because the system is broken isn’t a solution. It’s just surrender. Dressed up in “market-friendly” language.
It lets everyone off the hook.
I don’t always know where I land.
These debates will continue.
Josh and Randy will keep going at it. They should. The tension is real. The stakes are high.
Anything worth doing is worth working on to get it right.
Josh and Randy aren’t enemies. They are friends.
They talk about doing panels together.
Josh said, “I’m happy to sit on a panel with you and have a good conversation, my friend.”
That’s the part that can get lost. The people closest to the work have the most respect for it.
Josh has been in the secondary. Randy has been in the primary trenches.
I’ve done both.
We all disagree, but we’ve earned our opinions.
I don’t have all the answers.
Neither do Josh or Randy.
But what the debate inspired was a realization that the people who are willing to have legitimate, good faith conversations are the ones who might actually help build something better.
I think that’s what we all should focus on.
That’s why I’m still here.