The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened a hearing yesterday called "Fees Rolled on All Summer Long." If that sounds like a Kid Rock song, well, Kid Rock was sitting at the witness table.

I want to pause here and acknowledge that we live in a strange timeline. The Senate is making puns about "All Summer Long" in official government proceedings. Robert Ritchie (his real name, in case you forgot) is providing testimony about ticket scalping alongside Live Nation's Executive Vice President of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs. Washington is a weird place.

But the hearing itself touched on something real. Senator Marsha Blackburn opened by saying Americans "should not have to battle bots and fraudsters to see their favorite band." She described a ticketing system that has "exploited" the artist-fan connection and enabled scammers to drive up prices. The FTC is taking action. Congress is paying attention. It all sounds very serious.

And yet.

Here's what struck me about the hearing: it positions the problem as something that needs to be solved for artists and fans, by regulators and platforms. The government will step in. The FTC will crack down. Ticketmaster will implement new safeguards (it always promises new safeguards). The system will improve, eventually, if we're patient.

This framing misses something important. Artists already have the power to change this. Some of them are already doing it.

The artists who stopped waiting

In 2023, Robert Smith of The Cure went hunting. Not for bears or elk or whatever people hunt. He went looking for fake accounts in his own presale system. He found approximately 7,000 scalped tickets across 2,200 orders and personally canceled them. When venue fees exceeded ticket prices at some shows, he publicly called out Ticketmaster and forced $5-$10 refunds per ticket.

Smith could have waited for Congress. He could have waited for the FTC. Instead, he just... did it himself. And then he said something that still echoes: "The power of the artist, it's the ultimate power."

Hayley Williams announced her 2025 solo tour would require phone verification for presale registration, limit purchases to one registration per person with unique presale codes, and disable ticket transfers except where legally required. Her statement acknowledged the absurdity of the situation: "You shouldn't have to jump through hoops to buy tickets, but unfortunately, it's a broken and convoluted system."

Ed Sheeran tested blockchain ticketing in France, implemented named tickets with verification across European tours, and canceled over 10,000 tickets found on unauthorized resale sites. Two UK scalpers were prosecuted for bot-enabled reselling. They'd made approximately $13.9 million. They went to jail.

These are artists who stopped waiting for permission.

The numbers behind the frustration

During high-demand presales, 60-90% of traffic comes from bots. A single bot can purchase over 1,000 tickets in under 60 seconds. Ticketmaster claims to block 5 billion bot attempts per month. And yet, when Taylor Swift's Eras Tour presale opened in November 2022, the system collapsed anyway. 3.5 million fans registered through Verified Fan. Only 1.5 million received codes. But 14 million users flooded the site. It crashed within an hour.

A concert executive later told the Los Angeles Times that the Verified Fan database was full of resellers with fake email addresses.

Swift's response was telling: "It's excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse. We asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could."

That's the voice of an artist waiting for a platform to solve the problem. Compare it to Robert Smith, who just started canceling orders himself.

What actually works

Here's what the Senate hearing danced around but never quite landed on: the fundamental problem with current anti-bot systems is that they verify accounts and devices, when they should be verifying humans.

Scalpers can create thousands of accounts. They can deploy SIM farms to receive verification codes at scale. They can use antidetect browsers that bypass device fingerprinting. Bot operators openly claim 95% success rates against Ticketmaster's systems. The FTC revealed one operation that created or obtained 13,000+ Ticketmaster accounts.

But here's what scalpers cannot do: create additional humans.

This is the gap. Current solutions fight bots by tracking behavior patterns and flagging suspicious activity. It's an endless arms race where the defenses are always playing catch-up. The alternative is to verify, upfront, that each presale registration is a unique real person. One human, one code. The bots get filtered out before they ever reach the queue.

Artists like Smith and Williams and Sheeran have implemented versions of this through stricter registration requirements and manual enforcement. But it takes enormous effort, and most artists simply accept the status quo because changing it seems too hard.

It doesn't have to be.

The real question from yesterday's hearing

Senator Blackburn said she wants to "ensure the ticketing industry puts consumers before scammers." That's a nice sentiment. I'm sure everyone in that hearing room nodded along.

But the ticketing industry has structural reasons to tolerate the bot problem. Platforms collect fees on initial sales and resales. The secondary market generates revenue. The incentives are misaligned.

The question worth asking is whether artists will keep waiting for those incentives to change, or whether they'll take the approach Robert Smith took: assume the system won't fix itself, and build verification into their tour strategies.

Congress can hold hearings. The FTC can issue fines. But artists can actually decide, tomorrow, that their presales require real humans.

Some already have.