In a lawsuit filed Thursday, the Federal Commerce Fee (FTC) accused Reside Nation and Ticketmaster of misleading pricing and, extra severely, of successfully colluding with scalpers to maintain ticket costs artificially excessive.
“In public, defendants profess to prioritize ‘[g]etting tickets into the arms of followers, at costs set by the artist,’” the 84-page lawsuit, filed Thursday in California’s Central District Court docket, states. “Defendants additionally declare that ticket scalpers and ‘large resale websites’ are guilty for the resale tickets that defendants promote for considerably greater than the face worth of the ticket. In non-public, nonetheless, defendants have tacitly labored with these exact same scalpers, permitting them to unlawfully buy thousands and thousands of {dollars} in tickets within the main market, in order that defendants can extract extra revenue for themselves when reselling these tickets on the secondary market.”
It added that the alleged value gouging frustrates artists’ want to take care of reasonably priced ticket costs that match the wants of unusual American households.”
“When customers have looked for occasion tickets on Ticketmaster, defendants have displayed an inventory value within the search outcomes that doesn’t replicate the precise price to customers at checkout,” the criticism reads.
Again in Could 2024, the U.S. authorities sued Reside Nation for allegedly dominating the stay leisure ticketing trade.
On the time, Reside Nation referred to as the Division of Justice’s claims “baseless,” per CNN.
“The DOJ’s lawsuit received’t resolve the problems followers care about referring to ticket costs, service charges, and entry to in-demand exhibits,” Reside Nation mentioned in an announcement to the information channel. “Calling Ticketmaster a monopoly could also be a PR win for the DOJ within the brief time period, however it can lose in courtroom as a result of it ignores the essential economics of stay leisure.”
However the FTC mentions Reside Nation’s alleged monopoly as properly within the Thursday lawsuit.
“Ticketmaster dwarfs its rivals,” the lawsuit states. “The corporate controls roughly 80% or extra of main live performance venues’ main ticketing for live shows and a rising share of ticket resales within the secondary market. From 2019 to 2024 alone, customers spent greater than $82.6 billion buying tickets from Ticketmaster.”
The authorized transfer comes only a month after the FTC went after a Maryland ticket resale firm Key Funding Group for allegedly snatching up a whole lot of hundreds of seats at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and different main live shows in 2022 and 2023. The criticism accused Key Funding of violating the Higher On-line Ticket Gross sales Act through the use of misleading ways to bypass Ticketmaster limits. Federal regulators say the corporate created hundreds of faux accounts and IP addresses, SIM banks and digital bank cards to safe practically 380,000 tickets between November 2022 and December 2023.
The FTC accuses Reside Nation and Ticketmaster of violating the Higher On-line Ticket Gross sales Act is in search of everlasting injunction, financial reduction, civil penalties, and different reduction.
