The US Federal Trade Commission and seven state attorneys general has filed suit against Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster over illegal and deceptive practices involving funneling tickets to brokers and middlemen.
The lawsuit was filed in California and the FTC was joined by the attorneys general of seven states, including Illinois. As with the ongoing anti-trust action initiated under the Biden Administration, the new lawsuit is backed by both Democrat and Republican-helmed states, including Florida, Utah, Tennessee, Virginia, Colorado and Nebraska.
The lawsuit accuses Live Nation and Ticketmaster of “tacitly coordinating with brokers and allowing them to harvest millions of dollars worth of tickets.” Live Nation and Ticketmaster would then “sell the illegally harvested tickets at a substantial markup, causing consumers to pay significantly more than the face value of the ticket,” according to an FTC release.
A functional ticketing monopoly that controls ticketing for at least 80% of major venue ticketing, Live Nation and Ticketmaster stands accused of funneling tickets to brokers for the resale value far in excess of what they claimed, selling “millions of tickets” on resale platforms.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster are further accused of deceiving artists and consumers through “bait-and-switch pricing,” by listing lower prices for events than what they actually cost. These fees, which can be as high as 44% of the face value of the ticket, totaled an astonishing $16.4 billion from 2019-2024.
(Let’s repeat that: even aside from its main revenue sources, Live Nation and Ticketmaster allegedly skimmed SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS just from hidden but mandatory fees over a five year period. How’s your royalty statement looking in comparison to that?)
According to the FTC, a “senior Ticketmaster executive” wrote in an internal email that the companies “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers that violate the caps imposed on the amount of tickets they could buy. (After the CrowdSurge debacle, in which Ticketmaster executives openly bragged about hacking and destroying a rival, you would think Ticketmaster execs would have switched to using Signal for their evil deeds by now.)
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,” according to the FTC.
