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Thursday, September 25, 2025
“Yikes”: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says
Ars Technica: The Federal Trade Commission sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster on Thursday, alleging that the companies tacitly worked with scalpers to profit from jacking up ticket prices on the secondary market.
4 comments:
Ryan Hoffman
said...
I’m glad the FTC is finally cracking down on ticketmaster, they’ve had it their way for far far too long now. It’s been an internet joke for a while at this point, scalpers just taking all the tickets and leaving none for people who actually want to see the show. The fact that ticketmaster is just ignoring the loopholes these scalpers are using in order to get more money, as they then get not only the original ticket fees, but all the resell fees slapped on top of it, is very very wrong and it’s not good it’s gotten to this point. I’m very glad most of Broadway, with Disney being the only real exception, avoids using ticket master, rather they use in house software like Telecharge. If Broadway did use services like ticketmaster, any celebrity stunt casting would immediately get booked up and people would resell, especially for those more well known celebrities, which only hurts accessibility more. I’m excited to see the result of this lawsuit, and see if it turns into a class action eventually.
It’s insane how open Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been over the years about their complete lack of care for their consumers and how they favor profit over literally everything else. It’s apparent that their monopolization of ticketing for live entertainment is a net negative for all involved except for them and their scalping partners in crime. It’s a grift that has gone on for decades and the fact that it’s only just being addressed now is welcome but kind of worrying in that the federal government has let it go on for so long. The monetary gatekeeping of live entertainment is criminal on its own and that it’s being perpetuated by these money hungry ghouls is nothing short of wicked. As investigations into these companies continue I would not be surprised if more of these revealing emails show their grubby faces and cast light on the years of monopoly that these companies have had. I truly hate Ticketmaster and Live Nation for what they have done to live events in their commercialization and unfiltered capitalistic greed, turning what should be something for every American into an environment in which it costs “an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show”. Hopefully these investigations will create some much needed change in this corrupt industry.
Big surprise, a giant American corporation is corrupt. I think Ticketmaster is like the kid everyone knows cheats but nothing ever happens to them repercussion wise. I think it’s sad that we automatically assume when there’s a big concert, convention, or sports event that buying tickets will be nearly impossible. Knowing that you HAVE to be on your computer when tickets drop and knowing there’s a 5% chance you’ll actually even get to put a ticket in your cart and a 1% chance you’ll be fast enough at checkout to secure it is ridiculous. However, I do think artists, venues, and companies that put tickets up through Ticketmaster are well aware that Live Nation is allowing scalpers to scalp. Companies and brands that enable Ticketmaster to openly announce their corrupt behavior but still reap the billions of dollars is kind of a result of lack of backbone from consumers and scammed events from boycotting.
This article was an interesting read. I think that first and foremost, the biggest issue that we have with Ticketmaster that went unmentioned in this article, is the fact that Ticketmaster essentially has a monopoly over almost all concert style performing arts spaces (arenas, stadiums, etc.). There are very few concerts that can be seen without having to go through Ticketmaster. Having attended a concert run by Ticketmaster as well as not ticketmaster, the difference was night and day. First and foremost, in the non-Ticketmaster site, there were a lot of built in regulations to stop scalpers. For example, you could only buy a certain amount of tickets, and, while you could exchange your tickets with an individual, you could not resell your tickets, you could just return your tickets, and get your money back. There were also significantly less fees than there were on Ticketmaster, and the fees themselves were lower, especially with no dynamic pricing to increase them. It's interesting to read this article from a bit of Ticketmaster's perspective, where they sort of imply that they would be struggling without these fees, but in fact they're making a lot of money. I think that most people I know have already sort of come to an understanding that Ticketmaster does this with the scalpers. There's no way it cannot, not when there are so many tickets that no matter what end up on scalping sites, when there are pretty easy measures to take that wouldn't ruin or attract from the fans experience at all, that affects the scalpers. A huge part of this is that when scalpers buy tickets and then resell them at three times the value, Ticketmaster can jack their fees up and get much more returns from that as well. It's a rather vicious cycle.
4 comments:
I’m glad the FTC is finally cracking down on ticketmaster, they’ve had it their way for far far too long now. It’s been an internet joke for a while at this point, scalpers just taking all the tickets and leaving none for people who actually want to see the show. The fact that ticketmaster is just ignoring the loopholes these scalpers are using in order to get more money, as they then get not only the original ticket fees, but all the resell fees slapped on top of it, is very very wrong and it’s not good it’s gotten to this point. I’m very glad most of Broadway, with Disney being the only real exception, avoids using ticket master, rather they use in house software like Telecharge. If Broadway did use services like ticketmaster, any celebrity stunt casting would immediately get booked up and people would resell, especially for those more well known celebrities, which only hurts accessibility more. I’m excited to see the result of this lawsuit, and see if it turns into a class action eventually.
It’s insane how open Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been over the years about their complete lack of care for their consumers and how they favor profit over literally everything else. It’s apparent that their monopolization of ticketing for live entertainment is a net negative for all involved except for them and their scalping partners in crime. It’s a grift that has gone on for decades and the fact that it’s only just being addressed now is welcome but kind of worrying in that the federal government has let it go on for so long. The monetary gatekeeping of live entertainment is criminal on its own and that it’s being perpetuated by these money hungry ghouls is nothing short of wicked. As investigations into these companies continue I would not be surprised if more of these revealing emails show their grubby faces and cast light on the years of monopoly that these companies have had. I truly hate Ticketmaster and Live Nation for what they have done to live events in their commercialization and unfiltered capitalistic greed, turning what should be something for every American into an environment in which it costs “an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show”. Hopefully these investigations will create some much needed change in this corrupt industry.
Big surprise, a giant American corporation is corrupt. I think Ticketmaster is like the kid everyone knows cheats but nothing ever happens to them repercussion wise. I think it’s sad that we automatically assume when there’s a big concert, convention, or sports event that buying tickets will be nearly impossible. Knowing that you HAVE to be on your computer when tickets drop and knowing there’s a 5% chance you’ll actually even get to put a ticket in your cart and a 1% chance you’ll be fast enough at checkout to secure it is ridiculous. However, I do think artists, venues, and companies that put tickets up through Ticketmaster are well aware that Live Nation is allowing scalpers to scalp. Companies and brands that enable Ticketmaster to openly announce their corrupt behavior but still reap the billions of dollars is kind of a result of lack of backbone from consumers and scammed events from boycotting.
This article was an interesting read. I think that first and foremost, the biggest issue that we have with Ticketmaster that went unmentioned in this article, is the fact that Ticketmaster essentially has a monopoly over almost all concert style performing arts spaces (arenas, stadiums, etc.). There are very few concerts that can be seen without having to go through Ticketmaster. Having attended a concert run by Ticketmaster as well as not ticketmaster, the difference was night and day. First and foremost, in the non-Ticketmaster site, there were a lot of built in regulations to stop scalpers. For example, you could only buy a certain amount of tickets, and, while you could exchange your tickets with an individual, you could not resell your tickets, you could just return your tickets, and get your money back. There were also significantly less fees than there were on Ticketmaster, and the fees themselves were lower, especially with no dynamic pricing to increase them. It's interesting to read this article from a bit of Ticketmaster's perspective, where they sort of imply that they would be struggling without these fees, but in fact they're making a lot of money. I think that most people I know have already sort of come to an understanding that Ticketmaster does this with the scalpers. There's no way it cannot, not when there are so many tickets that no matter what end up on scalping sites, when there are pretty easy measures to take that wouldn't ruin or attract from the fans experience at all, that affects the scalpers. A huge part of this is that when scalpers buy tickets and then resell them at three times the value, Ticketmaster can jack their fees up and get much more returns from that as well. It's a rather vicious cycle.
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