FTC Sues Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Alleging Illegal Ticket Resale With Scalpers

The Federal Trade Commission is suing Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, accusing the companies of working with ticket scalpers to resell illegally obtained tickets at inflated prices on a secondary market.

The FTC and attorneys general from Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia allege that Ticketmaster profited from systematically violating the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The law prohibits the resale of tickets acquired by circumventing limits on the number of tickets a person can buy.

"American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us," FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in a statement Thursday. "It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician's show."

Ticketmaster and Live Nation did not immediately respond to requests for comment early Friday.

The FTC said Ticketmaster, headquartered in California, controls at least 80 percent of primary ticketing for major concert venues, with consumers spending more than $82.6 billion between 2019 and 2024. The commission said Ticketmaster earns significant revenue as both a ticket seller and reseller.

According to the lawsuit, artists typically set ticket prices and per-event purchase limits on the Ticketmaster website. However, the FTC alleges the company can "triple dip" by collecting fees from brokers who buy tickets on the primary market, charging fees again when those tickets are resold on Ticketmaster's secondary market, and also collecting fees from consumers who purchase tickets from brokers. Ticketmaster earned more than $11 billion in mandatory fees from consumers and brokers between 2019 and 2024, the lawsuit states.

The FTC also accused Ticketmaster of allowing or encouraging scalpers to use multiple accounts to evade security controls. A senior Ticketmaster executive allegedly acknowledged in an internal email, which included Live Nation leadership, that the companies "turn a blind eye as a matter of policy" to these violations. In 2018, an internal review found that five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and held 246,407 tickets to 2,594 events, according to the lawsuit.

Additionally, the FTC alleges that Ticketmaster deceived consumers with "bait-and-switch" pricing by advertising lower ticket prices and then adding mandatory fees at checkout-sometimes as high as 44 percent of the ticket cost. Between 2019 and 2024, consumers paid $16.4 billion in fees, according to the FTC.

Artists and fans have long criticized Ticketmaster's dominance in live entertainment, with frustration peaking in 2022 after high fees and site outages disrupted early sales for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. In 2023, the U.S. government and attorneys general from 30 states and the District of Columbia filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, seeking to break up the company.

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the FTC to take enforcement action against unfair, deceptive, and anti-competitive conduct in the secondary ticketing market.



via: https://www.audilous.com/uncategorized/ftc-sues-ticketmaster-live-nation-alleging-illegal-ticket-resale-with-scalpers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ftc-sues-ticketmaster-live-nation-alleging-illegal-ticket-resale-with-scalpers