A Ticket Resale Marketplace Just Wrote Its Own Rulebook — and Dared the Industry to Sign It

Changed Plans, the face-value ticket exchange out of San Diego, dropped something daring this week: a code of practice — an actual ethical standard, nine commitments long, that the company is now holding itself to and inviting competitors to adopt too.

It's an actual dare.

In the UK, resale operates under STAR’s Code of Practice — a real, published standard that fans, venues, and marketplaces can all point to. In the US? Nothing. No equivalent body, no equivalent code.

So Changed Plans built one, modeled on STAR’s, and put it online for anyone to sign. The nine commitments include things that sound almost quaint by secondary-market standards:

• Face value, always visible, never exceeded. No markup, no “market pricing,” no surge.
• No speculative listings. You can’t list a ticket you don’t actually hold — it has to be transferred and verified first.
• Buyer money sits in escrow until that verification happens.
• Burned buyers get made whole. Invalid ticket = full refund, not a chatbot apology.
• A real human handles disputes, with a published standard and a two-business-day answer.

Changed Plans itself is a small, scrappy operation — fan-to-fan resale for last-minute tickets, working venue-by-venue with independents, charging a flat 14% buyer fee with the first transaction free. This isn’t a company with the scale to force change on its own. The code is clearly designed to be bigger than the company that wrote it.

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Why this matters to us (read: you.)

We’ve made no secret of how we feel about the StubHub model of ticketing — dynamic markups that turn a $45 show into a $300 one, speculative listings for tickets that don’t exist yet, “fees” that appear at checkout like a jump scare, and a dispute process that functionally doesn’t exist until a chargeback forces the issue. That model treats the fan as a margin to be extracted, not a person who wanted to see a show.

What’s notable about the Changed Plans Code isn’t that one small company promises to behave well — plenty of marketplaces make soft promises in their About pages. It’s that they’ve made the promise falsifiable. A published code with specific, checkable commitments is a thing a venue can hold a partner to, a thing a journalist can audit, a thing a fan can point to when something goes wrong. That’s a meaningfully different posture than “trust us.”

Is this self-regulation instead of the actual regulation a lot of us think this industry needs? Sure. A voluntary code with one founding signatory isn’t a law, and nothing stops a company from quietly not renewing its commitment later. But a real, specific standard that others can be measured against — and pressured to adopt — is a genuine new tool in an industry that’s mostly had vibes and lawsuits.

What this means for artists and their teams

A few things worth doing with this news, not just reading it:

1. Ask your ticketing partner where they stand. If your current provider or any resale partner you work with has no public resale policy at all, this is a useful benchmark to put in front of them — “would you sign something like this?” is a fair question to start asking.
2. Point fans toward capped resale explicitly, in your official resale language on tour pages and socials. A lot of fans default to StubHub/SeatGeek simply because it’s the first result — a direct, named alternative in your own channels changes that default.
3. Read the actual nine commitments before citing this anywhere — especially the “only tickets held” and “money held in escrow” pieces. Those are the two that actually prevent the worst fan experiences (buying a ticket that turns out to be fake or never materializes), and they’re the two worth asking any resale partner about, Changed Plans or otherwise.
4. Watch who else signs. The real test of a code like this isn’t the founding signatory — it’s whether a venue, a festival, or a competing marketplace puts their name on it in the next few months. That’s the signal worth tracking, not this launch.

Changed Plans isn’t claiming to be STAR, and it’s explicit that it isn’t affiliated with the UK body. What it’s claiming is that a standard like this should exist here, and that somebody had to go first. Worth watching whether anyone follows.

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