We put out two albums with Hi Def. Played over 30 shows. Did the whole thing of building an audience from scratch, handling our own booking, figuring out what people would pay, learning which rooms made sense and which ones were a waste of time. I ran a charity show that raised over a grand. I know what it's like to be on the artist side of this, at a small scale, with real money on the line.
In April 2024, more than 250 working musicians signed an open letter to Congress in support of the Fans First Act. These weren't obscure acts — the list included major touring artists, Grammy winners, independent names with serious cultural footprints. This was not a union action or a coordinated lobbying campaign. These were individual musicians agreeing publicly that the current ticketing system is working against the people it's supposed to serve.
What the letter actually asks for
The Fans First Act's core provisions: all-in pricing visible from the first search result, mandatory disclosure of how ticket inventory is allocated across presales and general sale, anti-bot enforcement with real teeth, and a protected resale right for fans who can't use the tickets they bought.
None of that bans dynamic pricing. None of it sets a price ceiling. These are transparency requirements — show people what they're actually paying, show them where the tickets went. The artists signing this letter are not asking for price controls. They're asking for the system to stop lying to the people who support them.
Why artists signing it means something specific
When fans complain about fees, it's easy to frame them as people who want things for less than they're worth. When 250 working musicians say the system is damaging their relationship with their audiences, that framing doesn't hold. Artists have a direct financial interest in the current system maximizing revenue per transaction. They signed anyway.
What they're recognizing is that the short-term extraction of opaque dynamic pricing costs something real on the back end — fan trust. A fan who got gouged doesn't disappear. They carry that experience into every future ticket purchase. They remember whose name was on the ticket, even if the fee structure was the ticketing platform's decision entirely.
The legislative path is slow and the lobbying opposition is well-funded. But the combination of a 409-15 House vote and 250 artists publicly on record creates a different kind of pressure than either alone. For the artists and creators building outside that system, the window is now.