If you resold Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets, the IRS is watching — A new rule from the IRS is punishing those who resold tickets for more than $600 in profit with a tax penalty::A new rule from the IRS is punishing those who resold tickets for more than $600 in profit with a tax penalty.
Yeah I agree - as a small time gigging musician, fuck scalpers and also fuck government overreach here. Anything that hurts scalpers (in all fields, but tickets especially) is interesting to me and the average concert goer, but if it comes at the cost of broadly limiting the used music gear market, among thousands of other used equipment communities, it’s misdirected legislature at best.
The companies and systems that enable scalping and customer extortion such as Live Nation absolutely need to be limited and restricted, but setting a broad limit across all secondhand sales at $600 when it was previously $20,000 is an inaccurate miscorrection. More informed and nuanced legislature is necessary
To add a bit more context to this for the unaware: LiveNation is the umbrella Corp that owns TicketMaster as well as over 70% (IIRC) of the live music industry in the U.S. They’re making a killing on tickets, alcohol sales, backend software licensing, and many different artist/event management firms. They also pay their employees the lowest wages relative to the rest of the live music industry, which was already a vastly underpaid industry before Live Nation came to power in the 2010’s. Further, the CEO’s salary increased by 1000% between 2019 and 2023 while the peasants got a meaningless raise from pre-inflation starvation wages to post-inflation starvation wages. They’re the epitome of an exploitative monopoly, at every level.
Source: Current part time employee of LiveNation and 14 year veteran of the live music industry.
A list of their subsidiaries: https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/annual-reports/content/0001193125-08-043193/dex211.htm?TB_iframe=true&height=auto&width=auto&preload=false