The Federal Trade Commission in the United States announced this week that it was suing Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation. They allege that the ticketing behemoth is using underhanded tactics to raise prices for consumers.
The trade body is alleging that Ticketmaster is deceiving punters by advertising lower ticket prices than what consumers must pay and falsely claiming to impose strict limits on the number of tickets consumers can buy for an event.
Ticketmaster then, claims the suit, coordinates with ticket brokers who bypass those ticket limits. The FTC said brokers use fake accounts to buy up millions of dollars' worth of tickets and then sell them at a substantial markup on Ticketmaster’s platform. Ticketmaster benefits from the additional fees it then collects from those sales, the FTC has alleged.
Essentially, the FTC are alleging that Ticketmaster are defrauding the customer. And if it is true, the extent of this fraud could be enormous – the firm controls over 80% of ticketing in the US. Between 2019 and 2024 American consumers spent more than $82.6 billion buying tickets from Ticketmaster.
“American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us. It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favourite musician’s show,” The FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement.
This appears to be a rare bipartisan issue in an otherwise divided country. Ticketmaster has been in lawmakers’ sights for some time. The Biden administration moved to ban so-called ‘junk fees’ in 2024, ensuring that Ticketmaster display the full price of a ticket as soon as consumers browse online.
But Trump appears to be no friend of the firm either. In March he signed an executive order directing officials to ensure ticket resellers are complying with IRS rules. The order also directed the FTC to “take enforcement action to prevent unfair, deceptive, and anti-competitive conduct in the secondary ticketing market.” Which is precisely what they’re doing now.
Needless to say, the FTC action only applies in the US. There is no evidence (so far) that Ticketmaster is using the same underhand tactics in the UK or Europe.
