The Federal Trade Commission sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster on Thursday, alleging that the companies tacitly worked with scalpers to profit from jacking up ticket prices on the secondary market.
As the FTC alleged in a press release, Ticketmaster's years of turning a blind eye to scalpers violated the FTC Act and the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, costing customers "billions in inflated prices and additional fees." Further, artists' efforts to keep event costs low were repeatedly frustrated by executives' greedy bid to drive Ticketmaster revenue by reaping as many additional fees as possible, the FTC alleged.
Rather than blocking scalping, Ticketmaster allegedly provided tech support to help so-called brokers exceed "fake" ticket limits that seemingly only applied to genuine customers buying tickets to see events.
The FTC's investigation revealed that five of the biggest brokers controlled thousands of fake or purchased Ticketmaster accounts buying hundreds of thousands of event tickets and making it impossible for fans to "have a shot at buying fair-priced tickets," FTC chair Andrew Ferguson said.
From 2020 to 2024, just one broker known to Ticketmaster managed more than 13,000 accounts to circumvent ticket limits, the FTC alleged. But Ticketmaster allegedly saw only diminished revenue when it considered intervening, with one senior executive admitting—in an internal email that "copied Live Nation leadership"—turning a "blind eye" to brokers quickly became a "matter of policy." Ticketmaster also allegedly decreased fees for the highest-volume resellers to "incentivize them" to use Ticketmaster's platform for resales.
"American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us," Ferguson said. "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’s “triple dip” to collect more fees
Ticketmaster controls about 80 percent of "major concert venues’ primary ticketing" and increasingly controls "a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market," the FTC noted.
Seemingly, Ticketmaster uses this dominant position to "triple dip" on fees, maximizing gains from events by charging fees at initial purchase, then again from both sellers and buyers on the secondary market. Ticketmaster generates most of its revenue from these fees, the FTC said, raking in over $11 billion from 2019 through 2024—nearly $4 billion of which came from resale fees.