The Price Over Time
Robyn played The Anthem on 8 and 9 September 2026. The regular General Admission ticket cost $92.45 with fees: a buyer wrote “$92 with fees” in February, and StubHub and Gametime sellers entered $92.45 on their listings from February to September. The chart follows the cheapest General Admission seat on each page the Internet Archive captured, and wherever that listing carries its own face value, the value is $92.45. Every capture from February through March, on both platforms and both nights, sat above 1.20 times face, the most a buyer may pay once the RESALE Act applies. The cheapest seat came down to around face only in July and in the final week, when the fans further down this page were selling theirs. The shows came before the Act applies, so its lines are drawn dashed and the multiples measure what the law would have reached.
Each mark is the cheapest General Admission listing on the page when the Internet Archive captured it, against the $92.45 first-sale total. StubHub served those pages in euros or Canadian dollars; its prices are converted at the European Central Bank reference rate for the capture date. Gametime priced in US dollars and is shown before sales tax. Tap a mark for the capture; the table view lists every value.
Table view
Face Value on File
The plaintiffs in Ticket Policy Forum v. District of Columbia are the Ticket Policy Forum, a trade association whose members include StubHub, and four of its members: SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, Gametime and TickPick. Their complaint says marketplaces generally cannot know a ticket’s original purchase price and, for many listings, have no means of learning or verifying it. Gametime’s own listing record for the Robyn ticket, as its page served it on 18 February 2026, carries a field named faceValue beside the price it asked. A face value a seller types in is the seller’s statement and is not verified, which is the work the CCI protocol’s basis commitments exist to do; a marketplace that stores the seller’s figure beside the listing has a way of learning it, as the seller reports it.
The same kind of field appears elsewhere in the record. Gametime’s records carry a face value for listings to Public Image Ltd, The Midnight and Finn Wolfhard, though not for every listing captured. Vivid Seats’ page code carries a label for showing one, Face value: {amount}
. StubHub, a member of the Ticket Policy Forum but not itself a party, records the seller’s face value on many of its listings in US dollars, even on pages it priced in euros or Canadian dollars.
The Venue’s Last Printed Price
Until the spring of 2025, the 9:30 Club printed each show’s price on its own event page, beside the Ticketmaster button: $30.00 for the typical show, $55.00 for The Damned in May 2025. The Internet Archive kept the printed price for 578 shows at the 9:30 Club and The Anthem. In April 2025 the prices began to disappear, and the last one the archive caught, $36.00 for a MIXTAPE Pride Party, was captured on 8 May 2025. On 12 May 2025 the FTC’s rule requiring all-in prices for live-event tickets took effect. Since then the venues’ pages carry a button and no price. The first price of a ticket appears on Ticketmaster while the ticket is on sale, and on the resale platforms only as the face value a seller enters in a listing record, which the plaintiffs say they do not display.
Event pages on 930.com and theanthemdc.com captured by the Internet Archive each month, split by whether the page printed a ticket price. Up to three captures of each page are counted, spread across the time it was online.
Table view
The Wider Record
The venues’ printed prices make a basis for shows well before 2026. For 105 of the shows whose price the venues printed, the Internet Archive also kept a resale page captured before the show: 98 on Gametime, 6 on TickPick, 1 on StubHub and 1 on Vivid Seats. Against the venue’s printed price, the cheapest seat on those pages sat at a median of 1.17 times, so for most shows the cheapest resale seat was close to face. A sizeable minority ran far above it: the cheapest seat was more than 1.20 times the printed price for 39 shows and more than twice it for 15, led by Warren Zeiders at The Anthem, 5.30 times ($503.77 against a top printed price of $95.00) and Alex Warren at the 9:30 Club, 5.13 times ($154.00 against $30.00). The printed price leaves out Ticketmaster’s fees, so these multiples run above the all-in comparison the Act will make, and at The Anthem, where the venue printed a range of prices, each multiple uses the top of the range. Where Gametime recorded a seller’s face value on the listing itself, its price ran 1.15 to 1.50 times that face.
Each mark is one show: the cheapest seat on a resale page the Internet Archive captured before the show, as a multiple of the price the venue printed on its own event page, before fees. At The Anthem the multiple uses the top of the printed range. Tap a mark for the show and the capture; the table lists every show.
Table view
Fans and Platforms
Most fans selling to each other asked face or less. Paris Paloma fans offered General Admission tickets to the sold-out 24 October show for $25 to $60 against a $65.80 first-sale total, and Sylvan Esso fans asked $45 to $65 against $65.00; a few asked more, up to $100 for a $56.70 Passion Pit ticket. In the archived platform pages the same tickets started higher: the cheapest Sylvan Esso seat on StubHub three weeks out was $72.68 (1.12×), and the median of the four General Admission listings that capture holds in full was $98.39 (1.51×). The complaint is right that resale can fall below face. In the archived pages it does so mostly between fans, and once on a platform, when Gametime offered a Robyn ticket at $89.00 in July.
Multiples of each show’s first-sale total. Fans’ prices come from their own posts, per ticket; a price for a pair is halved. Platform marks are the cheapest General Admission seat in each archived capture.
Table view
Every Show
Fifteen show nights at the 9:30 Club and The Anthem in 2026. A multiple is drawn only where a first-sale total is established by a buyer’s order or by two sources that agree. Elsewhere the table gives what the record holds and leaves the multiple blank.
The Records
Every platform page behind this brief, as the Internet Archive captured it. Each row links to the capture and carries the SHA-256 hash of the page as read, so anyone can fetch it again and confirm it is the same page.
Complex Corporate Corruption
Complex Corporate Corruption is what happens when the price of everyday life is set by systems no one outside the company can see. A ticket to a show in Washington now passes through several of them. The venue sells it through Ticketmaster, which shows the price while the ticket is on sale, and has stopped printing that price on its own page. On the resale page the buyer sees the platform’s price; the face value a seller entered sits in the platform’s listing record, and the plaintiffs say they do not display it. In court, the plaintiffs say a marketplace generally cannot know the first price. No agreement among these companies is needed for this, and none is alleged here: each holds one piece of the price and shows the buyer the piece it chooses, and the number that would let a buyer check a resale price is not on the resale page. From 1 January 2027 the RESALE Act requires the original price with every listing for a covered event in the District, caps the resale price at 1.10 times it and caps the marketplace fee at 0.10 times it.
Method and Sources
First-sale totals
A show’s first-sale total is the price a buyer paid the box office for a General Admission or regular ticket, with fees and tax. It is used only where a buyer’s order states it or two independent sources agree: Robyn $92.45, Sylvan Esso $65.00, Paris Paloma $65.80 from a posted order, and Passion Pit $56.70. For the other shows the face value the platforms recorded is shown as recorded and no multiple is drawn. No missing price is estimated.
Currency
StubHub sets its prices in the visitor’s currency, and the Internet Archive’s crawlers reached it from more than one country: nine of the fifteen StubHub captures came in euros, five in Canadian dollars and one in US dollars. Each is converted at the European Central Bank reference rate for the capture date, or the last one published before it. StubHub embeds its own rate to the euro in the page; on the five pages priced in Canadian dollars it agrees with the ECB conversion within 1%, and on euro pages it adds no check. Gametime, Vivid Seats and TickPick priced in US dollars.
Listings in a capture
An archived StubHub page carries the low and high price across all its listings and the full record of the first 2 to 20 of them: section, ticket type, quantity, price, the seller’s face value where one was entered, and when the listing was created. The cheapest General Admission seat is read from those records, and a multiple is drawn only for a seat confirmed as General Admission. The highest price on each page, between 8 and 34 times face, is reported in the tables and kept out of the headline, because the archived page does not show what ticket it belongs to.
Fees
The Act caps the resale price and the marketplace fee, so the comparable resale figure is the price with fees. Gametime states sales tax separately, and its figures here are the price with fees, before tax. StubHub marks its prices as including estimated fees and does not say whether tax is included. The first-sale totals include the box office’s fees and tax.
The law
D.C. Law 26-181 applies from 1 January 2027. A resale price may be no more than 1.10 times the first-sale total, D.C. Code §28-5506(b), and a marketplace fee no more than 0.10 times it, §28-5506(c), so a buyer pays at most 1.20 times. Every show here came before the Act applies: the multiples measure what the law would have reached and describe no breach of it. Whether any conduct is unlawful is for the courts.