The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) is calling out Yelp over claims that the review site is putting misleading or fake concert ticket listings on venues’ Yelp pages, with NIVA sending a letter to the company’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman late Tuesday demanding the listings get taken down.
In the letter, NIVA executive director Stephen Parker wrote that the Yelp website “redirects users from purchasing legitimate tickets at face value from small businesses and nonprofits, instead sending them to a Yelp-branded TicketNetwork website that is price gouging and selling fake tickets.”
“This is a brand that has built a lot of trust for transparency and being a neutral arbiter for customer reviews,” Parker tells Rolling Stone. “On its face, Yelp is a brand that has nothing to do with ticketing, but now that we dig into these deceptive links that exist, it’s leading consumers down a path where they either pay a lot more money than they need to, or they get tickets that ultimately aren’t going to work.”
Ticket listings on Yelp don’t appear to be a new feature, with the company announcing a partnership with TicketNetwork in 2016 to bring the resale ticket service’s platform directly to Yelp. In a press release at the time, the companies said the feature “allows Yelp users to transact with a local business without ever leaving the Yelp site.”
But NIVA says it only discovered the feature this month when some of its venue members saw the listings on their Yelp pages, which the organization said misleads ticket buyers into thinking they’re buying directly from the concert venues while they’re actually using a “ticketing platform operated by a company with a long history of anti-competitive and predatory practices,” as NIVA claimed.
NIVA members began contacting Yelp at the beginning of August, a rep for the organization said, but that everyone was directed to talk with TicketNetwork. NIVA itself started reaching out to Yelp around a week ago, the rep added, sharing examples with the company’s leadership, but they didn’t get a response.
A rep for Yelp didn’t immediately reply to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
In the letter, NIVA shared several screenshots its member venues had provided, including a case in which four tickets for “Comedy Gumbeaux” next month at the Howlin’ Wolf in New Orleans were selling on Yelp for $750, versus the $50 face value the venue was selling them for on its own website.
NIVA also shared screenshots for ticket listings at the Fox Theatre in Boulder and the Crafthouse Stage and Grill in Pittsburgh for shows that weren’t actually scheduled at the concert venues. (When Rolling Stone clicked on links to shows that weren’t listed, we’d get prompted with a message that read “Sorry, there are no results for this event.”)
Another screenshot showed a ticket checkout for a seat section that doesn’t exist at the concert venue, while also detailing a “venue policy” that isn’t actually the venue’s ticketing policy, per NIVA.
A Yelp ticket page for a Cigarettes After Sex show at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland lists so-called “speculative tickets,” or tickets that the seller doesn’t actually have yet. That practice has been controversial among critics who argue it’s little more than fraud, and it’s recently been banned in several states including Maryland and Minnesota.
TicketNetwork is a well known platform that allows concert goers as well as brokers and scalpers to buy and sell tickets. It’s faced controversy before, as NIVA states in the letter, with the company settling complaints with the Federal Trade Commission as well as the New York Attorney General and Canada’s Competition Bureau in years past.
TicketNetwork didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Parker told Rolling Stone the situation further reflects the need for Congress to past the Fans First Act, which if passed would look to crack down on some of the issues in the secondary market including speculative tickets and the use of bots to buy up tickets to shows.
“We implore Yelp to take immediate corrective action to protect consumers, uphold the integrity of independent stages, and maintain the trust of the millions of users who rely on Yelp for accurate and honest information,” Parker wrote to Stoppelman in the letter Tuesday. “Every day these deceptive practices continue, the fabric of our communities is eroded, and the unique cultural experiences that independent stages provide are jeopardized.”