US regulator sues Ticketmaster over ‘illegal’ ticket schemes

A TOP US regulator on Thursday sued Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation, alleging the ticketing giant conspired with brokers to inflate concert ticket prices and deceive consumers with hidden fees.

The Federal Trade Commission, along with seven states, filed the lawsuit in a California federal court, accusing the companies of allowing ticket brokers to harvest millions of tickets in violation of purchase limits, and then resell them at marked-up prices.

Ticketmaster has been the object of anger and frustration from both artists and spectators for decades, with concertgoers complaining about overpriced tickets, opaque pricing schemes, and glitches that saw sales for Taylor Swift’s historic Eras Tour, among others, marred by breakdowns.

Most recently, the reunion tour of UK rockers Oasis sparked furor in Britain when dynamic pricing caused ticket prices to jump to hundreds of pounds above face-value costs.

American live entertainment “should be accessible to all of us. It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game,” said FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, citing President Donald Trump’s executive order to protect consumers from ticket pricing abuses.

The complaint alleges Ticketmaster, which controls about 80 per cent of major concert venue ticketing in the United States, turned “a blind eye” to brokers who routinely exceeded ticket limits using thousands of fake accounts.

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From 2019 to 2024, consumers spent more than US$82.6 billion purchasing tickets from Ticketmaster, the FTC said.

According to the complaint, the regulator said internal documents show Ticketmaster even provided technological support to brokers through a software platform called TradeDesk, enabling them to manage tickets purchased across multiple accounts for easier resale.

The lawsuit also targets Ticketmaster’s pricing practices, alleging the company advertised ticket prices substantially lower than what consumers ultimately paid after mandatory fees and markups.

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These hidden fees, which reached as high as 44 per cent of ticket cost, totalled US$16.4 billion from 2019-2024, the FTC said. AFP