The DC Council voted unanimously on July 23 to pass The RESALE Act, a ticketing reform law that caps resale prices at 10 percent above face value, bans the sale of tickets a reseller doesn’t yet possess, and requires anyone selling 50 or more tickets per year to register with the District. It takes effect January 1, 2027. It’s the broadest consumer protection framework for live entertainment in the country.
Seth Hurwitz saw this coming. He’s been saying it out loud since before most of the platforms now covered by the law existed.
Hurwitz, the founder and chairman of I.M.P., has operated Washington’s dominant independent concert ecosystem for 46 years across five venues: the 9:30 Club, The Anthem, the Lincoln Theatre, The Atlantis, and Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. He testified before Congress against the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger in 2009. He’s pushed for resale price caps in op-eds, interviews, and congressional testimony for years. His position has never changed, and the DC Council just codified it into law.
“Concerts should not become unaffordable because an artist got big,” Hurwitz said in response to the vote. The statement lands with the same plainness he’s always brought to the subject: no policy jargon, no hedged language, just the thing itself.
The core problem, as Hurwitz has argued for years, is the capture of ticket supply by professional resellers before fans can access it. Dynamic pricing on the primary market and high artist fees have both contributed to the 44 percent rise in average ticket prices between 2019 and 2024, but neither is the mechanism that locks ordinary fans out entirely. “The resellers now have methods to obtain all of the tickets and hold them hostage,” Hurwitz said. “That’s not free market. That becomes their market exclusively.”
The RESALE Act was written by Councilmember Charles Allen and supported by an unusually broad coalition of venues, theaters, and performing arts organizations across the District. Black Cat, Arena Stage, Ford’s Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Blues Alley, Howard Theatre, DC Improv, Union Stage, Pearl Street Warehouse, and dozens of others backed the legislation publicly. The unanimity of the Council vote, and the breadth of the industry coalition behind it, reflected what had become obvious to anyone operating a venue in Washington: the secondary market had broken something, and the tools available to fight it had not been working.
That last point was Hurwitz’s sharpest line on the day. “Everything else we’ve tried has just been whack-a-mole,” he said. “This ends that.”
The whack-a-mole problem is real and documented. When primary ticketing platforms have tried to limit scalping through lottery systems, verified fan sales, or non-transferable ticket experiments, resellers have adapted. When states have passed transparency requirements without price controls, resale markups have continued. The RESALE Act’s combination of a hard price cap, a ban on speculative listings, surveillance pricing prohibitions, and a registration requirement for high-volume sellers is designed to close the gaps that individual measures have left open.
Councilmember Allen described the stakes in pointed terms, referencing a recent disclosure that StubHub had been running a large-scale ticket scalping operation while claiming publicly to be a platform for fans to resell extra tickets. “People are sick of big tech wringing more and more money out of them,” Allen said. “DC is a leader here and I expect many other jurisdictions to step in once they see we can save our residents money and keep more dollars in our local economy instead of propping up big tech.”
That expectation is shared by the National Independent Venue Association, the trade group that has made resale price caps a central advocacy priority and whose founding members include I.M.P. Stephen Parker, NIVA’s executive director, called the DC law “the blueprint for the next generation of resale ticketing reform” and said he expects states across the country to follow. The UK banned for-profit resale entirely in November 2025. Australia committed to banning dynamic pricing on primary sales. Maine has had a hard resale cap in place. The DC law joins a growing body of international and domestic precedent that makes the argument, once treated as fringe, look increasingly like consensus.
For Hurwitz, the law is also a local vindication. He built his career in Washington, deliberately refusing to expand beyond the D.C. market even as competitors scaled nationally and then sold to larger operators. For decades he’s argued that live music should be accessible, that tickets shouldn’t be commodities, that the person in the room should be there for the music and not the arbitrage. That argument is now written into the legal code of the city where he built everything.
Audrey Fix Schaefer, I.M.P.’s director of communications, put it in direct economic terms: “This will stop opportunistic profiteers from making more than the artists, and it will enable more fans to see more shows, and then cross the street to enjoy a meal in the neighborhood restaurants, since they still have enough money in their pockets. The RESALE Act will keep millions of dollars in D.C.”
The law won’t take effect until the first of January. There will be litigation. There will be adaptation. There always is. But the argument Hurwitz has been making since before Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged, since before dynamic pricing was standard practice, since before bots could clear a 450-person venue in seconds: that argument is now enshrined in Washington, D.C. law.
“Methods have been developed for real people to sell to other real people,” Hurwitz said, “and will continue to do so.”
He has been waiting 17 years to say that.
