New York
—
The United States federal authorities and seven states are suing Ticketmaster and its guardian firm, Live Nation Entertainment, for failing to crack down on ticket resellers, which is forcing clients to “pay substantially more than face value” for popular concerts and and occasions.
The Federal Trade Commission leveled a litany of accusations towards Live Nation in its press release Thursday, together with “bait-and-switch pricing,” the place shoppers usually pay greater than marketed, and stated claims that the corporate imposes “strict limits” on ticket purchases are false since “ticket brokers routinely and substantially exceeded those limits.”
Shares of Live Nation (LYV) dropped greater than 2% in noon buying and selling. The firm didn’t instantly reply to NCS’s request for remark.
“American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us,” stated FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson in a launch. “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 dominates the market, controlling ticketing for about 80% of main venues within the United States. Consumers spent practically $83 billion shopping for tickets from the corporate between 2019 to 2024, the FTC stated.
The FTC additionally took goal on the firm’s charges. The company stated that charges are sometimes hidden and not proven till the tip of the acquisition, and they are often as a lot as 44% of the ultimate price of the ticket. Ticketmaster has collected $16 billion in charges from 2019 to 2024.
The FTC claims that Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s practices violates an govt order signed throughout President Donald Trump’s first time period in 2016, referred to as the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, a regulation that enables the company to take motion towards people and corporations that use bots to purchase live performance tickets in bulk and resell them.
Trump signed a similar order in March, just a few months into his second time period. Trump stated on the time that he hadn’t identified a lot about value gouging, “but I checked it out, and it is a big problem.”
The difficulty of value gouging drew heightened consideration throughout Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2022, when resale costs hit tens of hundreds of {dollars}. The sky-high costs prompted fierce backlash towards Ticketmaster, the nation’s greatest ticketing web site and live performance promoter, from lawmakers who accused the corporate of appearing as a monopoly.