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This is a guest post by Matt Zarracina, co-founder and CEO of True Tickets.
A federal jury has now found that Live Nation operated as a monopoly, capping a case that began with a Justice Department settlement attempt that failed to resolve broader concerns. But even with that verdict, the bigger question remains: what actually needs to change in ticketing?
Much of the conversation has focused on market power: who controls venues, who promotes shows, and whether one company should sit at the center of the entire live entertainment pipeline. Those are important questions. But they overlook a quieter infrastructure problem that sits underneath the entire ticketing system. It is the question of custody.
A ticket’s chain of custody governs what happens after a ticket is sold. Without it, bots, fraud, and price inflation can all thrive unchecked. That’s what fans experience as tickets disappearing instantly or reappearing at prices they simply can’t afford. With an effective chain of custody, those behaviors face more friction, become harder to scale and less profitable.
In naval aviation, there’s a concept known as the “Swiss cheese model.” No system is perfect, so protection comes from layering defenses. Each layer has holes, but together, those gaps are covered.
That same logic applies to ticketing. The industry often looks for a single fix. Better anti-bot technology. New legislation enforcing price caps on resale. Tighter ticketing contracts. But none of those are silver bullets. They are individual slices of cheese in a system that still lacks a critical layer. That missing layer is the chain of custody of the ticket itself.
Once a ticket leaves the primary sale, venues and event organizers often lose visibility into where it goes. Tickets move across marketplaces and exchanges outside the systems where they were issued. Bad actors exploit those gaps, and fans encounter price gouging or tickets that don’t work.
The Live Nation case focused on competition among companies that sell and promote tickets. But regardless of what follows this verdict, the ticket itself will still behave the same way once it leaves the primary sale, where it moves beyond the venue’s control and into a fragmented resale ecosystem. And that is where the industry’s structural weakness remains.
Custody does not mean creating another closed ecosystem where a single company controls everything. In fact, the opposite is true. Live events depend on a fragmented landscape of ticketing systems, venues, promoters, and resale marketplaces. No single entity should control that entire journey.
Custody is better understood as an infrastructure layer that sits above that fragmentation, allowing tickets to move between systems while still maintaining consistent rules.
“Open-ended quasi-assets”
Before going further, here’s what this looks like in the real world. In practice, custody as an infrastructure layer does not require replacing existing ticketing systems or marketplaces.
Today, tickets often function as open-ended quasi-assets once they’re sold, able to move freely without consistent rules or visibility. Custody changes that by attaching and enforcing rules while coupling identity to the ticket itself at the point of delivery, making the ticket a revocable license (as it was always intended to be). As the ticket is shared or resold, those rules persist, governing how it can move and ensuring that each handoff remains visible and verifiable.
For venues and promoters, that means maintaining a line of sight into who holds a ticket without needing to control every platform it touches. For legitimate resale and sharing, it does not remove flexibility; it simply ensures that those transactions happen within a framework that can be enforced. That ultimately sits with the venue or rights holder, who can choose to apply these controls at the point of delivery through the systems they already use to manage their tickets. Variations of this approach are already being used by venues in different markets, suggesting the question is no longer whether it works, but how widely it will be adopted.
Every policy discussion, from bot prevention to resale regulation, ultimately depends on how a ticket behaves once it is issued. If the ticket cannot maintain a reliable chain of custody, those policies will be unenforceable.
Bots are only part of the story
Consider the ongoing focus on bots. They create problems during high-demand on-sales, but they are only part of the story. The real issue is what happens after the purchase. If tickets can move freely through opaque channels with little accountability, the incentives for abuse remain.
Custody adds friction where it matters. Even if one layer of defense fails during the initial sale, downstream safeguards can limit the damage. In the Swiss cheese model, it is precisely these overlapping protections that prevent small failures from becoming larger ones.
Fans don’t spend much time thinking about ticketing; they simply expect that when they buy a ticket, it will work, and that the price they paid was fair. For venues and artists, the expectation is similar: that the people in the seats are the people they intended to reach.
Achieving that outcome requires more than competition among ticketing companies. It requires infrastructure that preserves the integrity of the ticket itself. The digitization of ticketing creates an opportunity to develop and implement infrastructure that makes enforcement possible at scale, similar to how financial regulations like AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) were essentially feckless until the digitization of finance.
The Live Nation verdict will continue to shape the conversation about power and competition in the industry. But regardless of that outcome, the broader questions remain unresolved.
How do we make the ticket itself more trustworthy as it moves through a fragmented marketplace? Until the industry adds that missing layer of custody, the holes in the system will remain wide enough for bad actors to exploit.
And no amount of slicing the market differently will close them.
