www.ticketnews.com: Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment are facing an unprecedented one-two punch from U.S. regulators. In one case filed this week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) – along with seven states – accuses Ticketmaster of deceiving consumers with hidden fees and by tacitly enabling scalpers to snag tickets en masse[1].
2 comments:
As someone that lost the “Ticketmaster war” multiple times for some of my favorite artists, I cannot describe how much resentment I have against the way they have almost monopolized ticket sales. Not only are the fees they are adding right before someone is about to check out sneaky, it is downright mean considering many of these people saved up and planned their tickets in advance, and were so excited to see an artist they love. However the main issue lies within the scalpers. I remember during ‘The Eras Tour,” the cheapest ticket you would find would be over 1,000 dollars and a “good seat” would be over 5,000. While that tour was an exception, I was looking at resell prices for artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande, and they are not only unaffordable, they are downright ridiculous. I can’t speak for all of these artists but I know for a fact that Ariana Grande expressed her concern with this and how she doesn’t want her fans to miss out because of scalpers. While you can say, “it’s just concert tickets,” it means a lot to people and the fact that a company that pretty much runs the ticket selling business can’t figure out how to make a better system and doesn’t care to try, is just sad.
This lawsuit is so overdue. Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been conversation points that friends and I have hashed and rehashed. We’ve discussed in depth how if Live Nation takes over one venue in a city, they start taking over more and more venues eventually monopolizing the city, making concerts and live events unaffordable for most people. Ticketmaster has insane surcharges that have made me not buy tickets to events because of the bait and switch that they’ve pulled. Honestly I would not be surprised if Live Nation/Ticketmaster had programmed their own bots. The fact that they turn a blind eye to their a hand full of brokers allowing them to control over 6,000 accounts is appalling and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of those brokers was an in-house employee of Live Nation. Ticketmaster providing a platform for scalpers insinuates that they have knowledge that these things have been occurring and have no intention of correcting them.
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