Two friends paid $140 each for tickets to a Madonna dance party at The Broadberry in Richmond, Virginia — tickets that were selling directly from the venue for just $17 and remained widely available at that price. It is the kind of markup that has become routine for concertgoers across the region, and it is leaving local venue operators fielding complaints about transactions they never made.
The episode is detailed in an Axios report that also found locals paying around $100 for $62 general-admission tickets to a Violent Femmes show at The National, according to Lucas Fritz, founder and talent buyer for Broadberry Entertainment Group. Fritz is the person behind The Broadberry, The Camel and Live Loud, and he books shows for The National and Richmond Music Hall. “It happens to so many people. Like literally. So many people,” Fritz told the outlet.
According to the same report, the Richmond woman who ended up paying more than $100 for Madonna party tickets had followed an online advertisement to make her purchase, while the Violent Femmes customer found a reseller after googling the show and clicking the first search result. Neither buyer appears to have realized they were buying from a secondary seller rather than the venue itself.
Why Resellers Keep Winning the Search Results
Per Fritz, secondary ticket sellers can simply outspend local venues on advertising to secure top search-engine placement, meaning fans searching for a show are often funneled to a reseller's listing before they ever see the venue's own page. Broadberry Entertainment Group, which Fritz co-owns with Jessica Gordon, produces more than 500 live events annually and operates as the largest independent concert promoter in Virginia, having formed a strategic booking and marketing partnership with East Coast promoter The Bowery Presents in July 2024.
Stephen Parker, per the National Independent Venue Association, identified three main resale-market problems driving this pattern: speculative ticketing, in which sellers list tickets they do not yet possess, sometimes before a venue has even opened sales; price gouging, where resellers buy tickets and flip them at steep markups; and resale deception, which leaves buyers believing they are purchasing from a venue or primary seller when they are not.
Google Ads does maintain an event ticket sales policy requiring third-party resellers to get platform certification and display secondary-market disclaimers within the top 20% of their landing pages, according to Google Ads. Even so, secondary ticket brokers frequently outspend local venues for top paid search placement despite those rules.
A National Price Tag Behind the Local Complaints
The scale of the problem extends well beyond Richmond. Professional corporate resellers account for roughly 70% to 80% of secondary-market activity, per a Vanderbilt report cited in the Axios piece, and those resellers add an estimated $4.5 billion annually in unnecessary costs for live-event fans nationwide. A separate August 2026 white paper from the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator put the combined burden of reseller markups and platform processing fees at $11.3 billion a year, finding that fans lose an average of $12 to markup price gouging for every $1 they save buying secondhand.
A study of 65 live music tours by the National Independent Talent Organization found an average secondary market markup of 91%, with some platform service fees exceeding 100% of face value. Independent talent representatives emphasize that those markups generate revenue solely for brokers, not for the performing artists or the venues hosting them.
Resale platforms and their supporters counter that secondary markets give fans more flexibility to buy and sell tickets, and that established resale platforms can offer protections against counterfeit tickets. Concertgoers who unknowingly buy marked-up resale tickets still often turn to venues for help, even though the venues were not involved in the resale transactions, leaving local operators to deal with angry fans over sales they did not process.
What Virginia Law Does and Doesn't Cover
Virginia has tightened some ticket-resale rules in recent years. Under Virginia Code § 59.1-466.8, enacted in 2023, the state bars resellers from using venue branding, URLs or website designs that could reasonably mislead buyers, according to Virginia law. But the statute does not specifically ban speculative ticketing, and it generally protects a purchaser's ability to resell tickets online — meaning the practices driving Richmond's markups remain legal even as the misleading branding itself is not.
Federal rules add another layer, though a partial one. The Federal Trade Commission's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, which took effect in May 2025, requires ticketing platforms and resellers to display total purchase prices — including all mandatory convenience and service fees — from the initial search stage, per the Federal Trade Commission. Violations can carry civil penalties exceeding $50,000 each, though the rule mandates fee disclosures rather than capping the markups themselves. In April 2025, the U.S. House passed the TICKET Act by a 409-15 vote, proposing similar all-in pricing requirements nationwide, though venue groups have raised concerns that provisions for ticket concierge services could create loopholes for speculative brokers.
Other jurisdictions have moved further. California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 1349 in September 2026 to ban speculative ticket sales outright, requiring resellers to prove ownership or constructive possession of a ticket before listing it — a step Virginia has not taken. Enforcement fights are also playing out elsewhere: seven Eastern Pennsylvania counties sued secondary platform Vivid Seats that same month, alleging deceptive pricing inflated ticket totals by up to 80%, and independent New Orleans venue Howlin' Wolf filed a federal false-advertising suit against StubHub, alleging that bulk commercial resellers account for up to 80% of its secondary listings.
For now, Fritz's advice to Richmond concertgoers is simple: start at the artist's or venue's official website and follow its own ticket link, rather than trusting the first search result or an ad that pops up along the way. It won't fix the gap in state or federal law, but it is the one move available to fans who want to avoid paying $140 for a $17 ticket.
