The World Cup is over and we have a winner: after an exciting and drama-filled tournament, Spain has been crowned the ultimate champion. But there’s also a loser – and that is clearly StubHub.
The biggest name in ticket resale had issues before the World Cup, but the company is emerging from the event beset by problems of its own making. Texas and British Columbia are investigating StubHub for selling tickets that didn’t exist, consumers have filed class-action lawsuits in New York and Vancouver over the same reasons, and Ontario has added the company to its Consumer Beware List. Perhaps the most serious problem is the revelation that StubHub chief executive Eric Baker also runs a mass scalping side hustle through the website.
Many of the stories over the past few months, including the Baker bombshell, were turned up by CBC News investigative reporter Dave Seglins. His interest in the mess that is the ticketing business goes back nearly a decade further to a hidden camera investigation of a scalper convention in Las Vegas, where he and his colleagues caught Ticketmaster representatives not only encouraging mass resellers to use their platform, but recruiting them to do so.
That story figured into the recent U.S. antitrust case against Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, just as Seglins’ latest coverage has sparked the various government probes and lawsuits against StubHub.
No other journalist in Canada has covered this field as closely or with as much impact. In this episode, Seglins joins Do Not Pass Go to take us behind the scenes of the ticketing business, and to discuss why concerts and sporting events are deserving of serious attention from policy makers.
Check out the story on Eric Baker here, and the 2018 scalper convention investigation here. And here is the interview with Live Nation executive Dan Wall referred to in this episode.
