Hundreds of kids and families lined up outside Milwaukee's Landmark Credit Union Live on Sept. 30 expecting a night of pop stardom with Freya Skye, only to be turned away at the door because their tickets, mostly bought through resale sites, would not scan. Parents who had planned birthday parties and first-concert milestones around the sold-out show instead found themselves standing in a line reportedly three blocks long, watching their kids' excitement curdle into disappointment.
As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Amanda Montoya bought tickets through StubHub back in March for her daughter Marley's 13th birthday, only to discover on concert night that they were invalid. Montoya and Marley waited 30 to 40 minutes before giving up and heading home. Montoya told the newspaper her daughter was sad, and she estimated that at least 100 young girls were shut out of the show altogether. The outlet reported that fans in line began singing Freya Skye songs together while trying to troubleshoot their tickets, and that a security officer on site said hundreds of kids and families had been turned away.
A Birthday Gift and a Hotel Booking Gone Wrong
Heather Hulick had booked a hotel and made a two-hour drive to Milwaukee for what was supposed to be her 10-year-old daughter's first concert, according to the Journal Sentinel's reporting. At 7:43 p.m., just before the show's scheduled 8 p.m. start, Hulick received a notification that her GoTickets ticket had been canceled. She later received a full refund from GoTickets, the paper reported — a contrast to Montoya, who told the Journal Sentinel she had not yet received a refund from StubHub and was still seeking one. Jimmy Chau told the paper he had purchased tickets from SeatGeek months before the show and, worried about the risk, bought backup tickets through StubHub as well — only to learn his StubHub tickets could not be transferred.
Why the Tickets Failed
The breakdown traces back to how Freya Skye's tour was ticketed. The show used Ticketmaster's Face Value Exchange system, which is designed to stop scalpers from buying and reselling tickets at inflated prices by also blocking transfers to most online resale marketplaces, the Journal Sentinel reported. Ticketmaster served as the direct seller for all shows at Landmark Credit Union Live, meaning valid tickets were only available through Ticketmaster or CashorTrade — not through StubHub, GoTickets, or SeatGeek, which were unable to sell valid tickets for the concert, per the paper's reporting.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson denied that the ticketing system had experienced any glitch, instead blaming scalpers and third-party ticket-selling sites for the chaos, according to the Journal Sentinel. Landmark Credit Union Live, which is partially operated by Live Nation, acknowledged that some people had bought invalid tickets. Ticketmaster and the venue issued a joint statement saying major resale marketplaces had allowed scalpers to sell invalid tickets for the show, and that while they had helped many affected customers get inside, they could not resolve every situation. StubHub, for its part, attributed the issue to a general ticketing-system error and said fans had encountered a barcode glitch at the door, promising to make every affected customer whole, the paper reported.
A Newly Opened Deer District Stage
The venue at the center of the fiasco is itself a recent addition to Milwaukee's concert scene. Landmark Credit Union Live is an 83,000-square-foot, 4,500-capacity venue in the Deer District that officially opened in February, built on part of the former Bradley Center site, according to Urban Milwaukee. The hall is operated by FPC Live, a subsidiary of Frank Productions and Live Nation Entertainment, in partnership with the Milwaukee Bucks, with Brookfield-based Landmark Credit Union having secured the naming rights last October, per Wikipedia's entry on the venue. That corporate structure explains why Ticketmaster held exclusive primary-seller status for the show. Hoodline previously covered the venue's debut when Dermot Kennedy played the Deer District stage in September.
A Rising Teen Star With Disney Roots
Freya Skye, a 16-year-old singer-songwriter and actress who appeared in Disney's Zombies franchise, has built a young fanbase that made the Milwaukee stop a hot ticket. The concert fell on the North American leg of her debut headlining Stars Align Tour, which launched Feb. 6 in Portland, Oregon, and spans 62 dates across North America, Europe, and Oceania, with 19-year-old Alex Sampson opening, according to her tour's Wikipedia page. For every ticket sold on the tour, $1 is donated through PLUS1 to Active Minds, a youth mental health nonprofit, per ListenSD.
A Scaling National Fight Over Resale Tickets
The Milwaukee mess is the latest flashpoint in a much larger battle over how concert tickets move between fans. Ticketmaster's Face Value Exchange restrictions are meant to block scalping, but state laws in New York, Illinois, and Colorado prohibit non-transferability rules outright, creating what Live Nation describes as an inconsistent legal landscape for touring acts — enforceable in Wisconsin but not in several other states. Live Nation and Ticketmaster have also reported blocking an average of 566 million automated bot attacks daily and rejecting 99.7% of 25 million daily sign-up attempts aimed at speculative ticket brokers.
Federal lawmakers are already moving on the issue. The U.S. House voted 409-15 in April 2025 to pass the TICKET Act, which would require all-in ticket pricing and ban speculative ticketing — the practice of secondary sellers listing tickets they do not actually own, according to Softjourn. More recently, Senators Ben Ray Luján and Shelley Moore Capito introduced the GHOST Act this September, bipartisan legislation aimed at penalizing secondary brokers who advertise and sell speculative tickets without ever owning them. Wisconsin lawmakers have been grappling with the same question closer to home, holding public hearings earlier this year on proposed state legislation to regulate secondary ticket markets, restrict speculative listings, and protect artist-set transfer rules, according to Channel 3000.
Industry-wide, the pattern echoes Hoodline's August coverage of Noah Kahan's Minneapolis tour stop, which discussed resale listings and Ticketmaster's Face Value Exchange. As more artists adopt the same anti-scalping tools, families booking tickets months in advance remain at risk of discovering, often only at the venue gate, that their seats were never guaranteed to begin with.
