The US government has long had its sights set on Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the behemoth concert promoter and ticket seller, which merged in 2010. Last year the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, while the House of Representatives passed the TICKET Act, which demands transparency in ticket pricing. (It failed to become law before the current congressional term began in January; another version of the TICKET Act was introduced in February, but it's yet to pass the House or Senate.)
Now the Federal Trade Commission is piling on. In a new lawsuit filed today, the FTC and seven states accused Live Nation and Ticketmaster of costing fans millions of dollars by secretly allowing ticket brokers to buy concert tickets and sell them at inflated prices, Reuters reports. The suit was filed in California, with participation from Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia.
The suit alleges that Ticketmaster, which controls 80% of primary ticketing for major concert venues, quietly allowed brokers to violate ticket purchasing limits set by artists, which led to Ticketmaster collecting $3.7 billion in resale fees between 2019 and 2024. Per the FTC, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have known about brokers breaking the rules since 2018. The suit also cites Ticketmaster's failure to disclose the full price of tickets, including fees, up front.
Ticketmaster has insinuated that they've been fending off scalpers by implementing surge pricing, wherein tickets are more expensive when they first go on sale and then decrease in price over time based on demand. But some arena-touring artists, like the Cure's Robert Smith, have opted out of Ticketmaster's "dynamic pricing" model, saying that it doesn't actually do fans any good when they're trying to buy tickets. And according to the FTC's lawsuit, it seems like Ticketmaster also doesn't think dynamic pricing makes buying tickets any easier for fans: The complaint cites an internal email where a Ticketmaster executive allegedly told Live Nation that the companies "turn a blind eye as a matter of policy" to scalpers' violations.
"The Trump-Vance FTC is working hard to ensure that fans have a shot at buying fair-priced tickets, and today’s lawsuit is a monumental step in that direction,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement.
