The US’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued Live Nation and its ticketing arm, Ticketmaster, accusing the company of profiting from scalpers operating on its platform.
In a complaint filed on Thursday (September 18) in the US District Court for the Central District of California, the FTC accused Ticketmaster of failing to uphold its own ticket purchase limits, in effect allowing scalpers to buy up large numbers of tickets and to resell them on the secondary market at markups.
The FTC says Ticketmaster is motivated to do this because it makes additional fees on the tickets’ resale.
Ticketmaster “can ‘triple dip’ on fees, collecting fees from: (1) brokers when they purchase the tickets on the primary market, (2) brokers, again, when Ticketmaster sells their tickets on Ticketmaster’s secondary market, and, finally, (3) consumers who purchase tickets from Ticketmaster on its secondary market,” stated the complaint.
Joining the FTC in the lawsuit are the district attorneys of seven states: Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.
The complaint, which you can read in full here, alleges that Ticketmaster violated the BOTS Act, the 2016 law forbidding the use of bots to buy tickets in online stores. Live Nation has in the past supported the BOTS Act.
The FTC notes that Live Nation’s policy is to allow artists to set ticket purchase limits themselves, but “in private… defendants have tacitly worked with those very same scalpers, allowing them to unlawfully purchase millions of dollars in tickets in the primary market, so that defendants can extract more profit for themselves when reselling those tickets on the secondary market.”
The FTC alleges that Ticketmaster has been aware for years that certain ticket buyers have violated the limit and “turned a blind eye” to the practice.
The complaint states that in 2018, Ticketmaster identified five ticket brokers who controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed more than 246,000 tickets to nearly 2,600 events.
“Defendants have tacitly worked with those very same scalpers, allowing them to unlawfully purchase millions of dollars in tickets in the primary market, so that defendants can extract more profit for themselves when reselling those tickets on the secondary market.”
FTC complaint against Live Nation/Ticketmaster
“In public, defendants maintain that their business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits. In private, defendants acknowledge that their 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,” the complaint states.
The FTC also alleges that Ticketmaster is engaged in “bait-and-switch” tactics in which the company displays “deceptively low ticket prices to consumers” and ends up charging “much more” at checkout.
Live Nation announced in 2023 that it was switching to an “all-in” pricing model at its owned venues in the US, under which the final price, including fees but excluding sales taxes, is shown at the very beginning of the ticket purchase process. CEO Michael Rapino has said that the switch to “all-in” pricing has proven to be a success, and the company has backed efforts to make all-in ticket pricing the law.
Despite this, the FTC alleges that “over the last decade, the first price the consumer has seen on Ticketmaster’s platform has almost never been the price the consumer pays.”
“According to internal Ticketmaster documents, the average percentage of fees charged on tickets ranges from 24% to 44% of the total price. From 2019 through 2024, consumers paid over $16.4 billion in mandatory fees on ticket purchases from Ticketmaster,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit is separate from the antitrust action that the US Department of Justice launched against Live Nation and Ticketmaster in May 2024. That lawsuit alleges that the company engaged in “monopolization and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry.”
The DOJ lawsuit is seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, undoing a years-old agreement that allowed the two to merge despite concerns over the company potentially enjoying monopoly power in the live entertainment business. The DOJ has accused Live Nation of violating the terms of that agreement.
In its new lawsuit, the FTC says Live Nation/Ticketmaster controls “roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market.”
As of 12pm ET on Thursday (September 18), Live Nation shares were down 3.6% on the New York Stock Exchange, trading at around $163.30 per share.Music Business Worldwide
