The concert ticket business is a multi-billion dollar franchise and Ticketmaster with Live Nation have a big monopoly on that business. Tickets purchased anywhere other than the venue box office has seen an increasing amount of “fees” for everything from the seller clicking the keys to breathing the air in the arena.
In response to an increasingly expensive problem the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a suit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster for “engaging in illegal ticket resale tactics and deceiving artists and consumers about price and ticket limits.
The FTC has joined forces with seven states – Virginia, Utah, Florida, Tennessee, Nebraska, Illinois and Colorado – claiming that they have aligned with brokers allowing Ticketmaster and Live Nation to earn millions of dollars in ticket sales via secondary markets where ticket prices are often several times the original ticket price.
The suit further alleges that Ticketmaster and the parent company Live Nation has…
deceived both artists and concert goers by advertising lower ticket prices than the actual amount needed to purchase a ticket
deceived ticket buyers with ticket limits while brokers routinely exceed the limit
selling millions of tickets on secondary markets and earning millions of dollars in the process
FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson noted, “President Donald Trump made it clear in his March Executive Order that the federal government must protect Americans from being ripped off when they buy tickets to live events. American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us. It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show. The Trump-Vance FTC is working hard to ensure that fans have a shot at buying fair-priced tickets, and today’s lawsuit is a monumental step in that direction.”
Currently Ticketmaster controls some 80% of primary ticket sales; plus a growing percentage of the secondary markets. The FTC estimates that between the years of 2019-24, consumers spent over $82.6 billion buying tickets – and keep in mind that was during the Covid era when many events were cancelled.
The FTC alleges that privately Ticketmaster admits, “its business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set.”
In the suit, the FTC alleges Ticketmaster:
– Despite implementing security measures, Ticketmaster is aware that brokers routinely bypass such measures by creating thousands of Ticketmaster accounts and using proxy IP addresses in order to purchase event tickets.
-Ticketmaster nevertheless allows brokers to post these illegally obtained tickets for resale on its platform, then profits from the additional fees and markups it unilaterally adds to the resale tickets.
-In fact, a senior Ticketmaster executive admitted in an internal email that copied Live Nation leadership, that the companies “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers’ violations of posted ticket limits. For example, an internal review showed that just five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed 246,407 concert tickets to 2,594 events.
-Ticketmaster and Live Nation even offer technological support to brokers through a software platform called TradeDesk, which enables brokers to track and aggregate tickets purchased from multiple Ticketmaster accounts into a single interface for simpler resale management. Through TradeDesk, Ticketmaster can identify which high-volume brokers are exceeding ticket limits through the use of hundreds, or even thousands, of Ticketmaster accounts.
-The companies also have consistently declined to deploy additional technology that would more effectively prevent brokers from evading ticket limits because such tactics would decrease their revenue, according to internal company documents. For example, the company in 2021 opted against using third-party identity verification because it was “too effective.”
-In addition, Ticketmaster deceived the American people by advertising list prices for tickets that were substantially lower than the actual cost consumers paid after fees and markups were added. The FTC alleged that Ticketmaster hid the mandatory fees, which are as high as 44% of the cost of the ticket, that it didn’t add the fees to the price of tickets until the very end of the transaction, and still failed to clearly detail the extra fees before consumers paid for the tickets. The fees totaled $16.4 billion from 2019-2024.
-Despite publicly claiming that they support consumers knowing the “full cost of their tickets from the start,” company executives acknowledged internally that Ticketmaster engaged in deceptive pricing and deliberately continued that approach after internal research showed consumers were less likely to purchase tickets when they are informed of the true cost upfront.
According to the FTC, these actions are in violation of the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. The suit is seeking civil penalties plus any additional relief the court deems appropriate.