U.S. Sues Ticketmaster Over Claims of Illegal Resale Tactics

Business|U.S. Sues Ticketmaster Over Claims of Illegal Resale Tactics

The Federal Trade Commission and seven states on Thursday sued Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, claiming the entertainment giant had broken the law by allowing brokers to buy up millions of dollars of tickets and resell them at higher prices.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California, accused Ticketmaster of deceptive practices that advertised lower prices than were available, as well as falsely claiming it set limits on the number of tickets people could buy. Brokers bought thousands of tickets at face value, then resold them for higher prices on Ticketmaster, allowing the company to collect additional fees, according to the suit.

In one case, a broker purchased more than 9,000 tickets on Ticketmaster for a single concert during Beyoncé’s 2023 “Renaissance” tour, after which the company resold more than 2,500 of them, according to the lawsuit.

“American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us,” said Andrew Ferguson, the F.T.C.’s chair, in a statement. “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.

The F.T.C.’s lawsuit is part of growing regulatory scrutiny of the entertainment giants’ power over musicians and fans after a government-approved merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010.

In 2022, thousands of fans couldn’t purchase tickets on Ticketmaster for Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, prompting senators to grill company executives at a hearing.

Last year, the Justice Department and several states filed a lawsuit accusing Live Nation of leveraging its sprawling empire to dominate the industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, pressuring artists to use its services and threatening its rivals with financial retribution. Those tactics resulted in higher ticket prices, the government argued.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order acknowledging that ticket resale middlemen drove up prices and urged the F.T.C. to enforce competition laws in the sector.

The F.T.C.’s lawsuit on Thursday contended that Ticketmaster controls at least 80 percent of primary ticketing for concerts at major venues, and a growing number of ticket resales.

Ticketmaster would “encourage” brokers to use multiple accounts to circumvent ticket-buying limits, the lawsuit claimed. In one email sent to Live Nation executives, a senior Ticketmaster executive said the companies “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers flouting the ticket limit rules, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit detailed examples of Ticketmaster executives acknowledging that a single ticket broker — sometimes referred to as a scalper — gained access to 8,000 tickets through hiring college students to buy the ticket limit of eight and then transfer them.

Ticketmaster declined to enforce ticket limits on brokers because the company can collect additional reselling fees, the lawsuit claims. Ticketmaster and Live Nation earned $986 million in resale fees from 2019 to 2024, according to the suit.