Perhaps I could offer some thoughts.
One of the recommendations I brought forward, which echos what my peer here had to say, is investment in technology. As I said, this is a global problem. It's a problem that's trying to be addressed by the private sector and governments around the world.
We're moving in the right direction. You can compare with other industries. If you take a look at the airline industry, you don't have a problem of transferability of tickets, because there are safeguards in place to prevent you from doing that. I could not buy an airline ticket and sell it to somebody else and have that individual get on the airplane and travel. One of the issues for us in the concert industry is that we're trying to process a lot of humans into a very small space in a very short amount of time. For anybody who is lined up to go through a check-in at the airport, it would simply be impractical if I were doing it in a 2,500 capacity concert hall.
However, we're getting there. Technology is moving forward. Various biometric tools and a variety of different things are improving our ability to provide some technological controls over what happens with a ticket after it leaves our system. That addresses a lot of the concerns. It addresses the customer service concerns. It addresses the transferability. There are a number of positives that come with it. The technology is just not quite there yet or hasn't been implemented sufficiently. I prefer those sorts of solutions rather than the legislated ones for some of the reasons I discussed earlier.
For example, some of the values we've heard about and some of the things that have just been referenced would suggest you might want to influence what people can sell tickets for, and have a much heavier hand in controlling that side of the world. Again, at least in my world, this really does all go back to the artist and the artist's intentions. I'll remind the committee that for the popular music world in Canada, we are certainly host to a lot of international artists coming through. Even many of our own artists are represented internationally by management, booking agents and others.
At the same time, they're trying to come up with their own solutions to these problems. They're implementing them on a tour-wide basis. You have some artists like Adele or Mumford & Sons, very popular artists who are very much in control of their ticketing world. They have very specific demands for how their ticketing rolls out and what they do to curb the secondary market.
I'm of the belief that if we as a country or as a series of provinces and territories start legislating too much, restricting control over who, what, where and when of the ticketing industry, that will alienate some of those international artists, maybe limiting the number of times they'll come to Canada, limiting the number of cities they'll perform in. Those artists, in many ways, including a number of our own domestic artists, are responsible for an incredible amount of economic impact. I would just caution us against going too far.