Ticketmaster Finds Itself in Federal Crosshairs Again

Live Nation/Ticketmaster, the giant event conglomerate that concert fans love to loathe, is facing yet another federal lawsuit.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states sued the company Sept. 18, accusing it of “tacitly coordinating with brokers and allowing them to harvest millions of dollars worth of tickets in the primary market,” according to a statement from the FTC.

According to the suit, ticket brokers create thousands of proxy Ticketmaster accounts that go to work when a major music, sporting or other event goes on sale online, pulling massive numbers of face-value tickets out of circulation for ordinary buyers and putting them up for sale on secondary ticket marketplaces at big markups.

Ticketmaster not only does little to prevent the practice, the FTC alleges, it facilitates it. The FTC press release cites an internal email from a Ticketmaster exec admitting that they “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to violations of posted ticket limits, going so far as to provide brokers with a software platform called TradeDesk that allows them to track and aggregate tickets bought through multiple accounts.

The suit goes on to allege that because Ticketmaster operates a huge secondary marketplace of its own, it profits by the practice, because it collects fees when a ticket is sold at face value and again when it is sold on the company’s resale site.

The attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia joined in the suit, which seeks civil penalties and “any additional monetary relief that the court finds appropriate.”

While the suit will take time to wind through the courts, it’s part of a larger effort to target ticket brokers who skirt the rules and harvest thousands of tickets for major events — an effort that could start to tip the scales back toward fans.

Ticketmaster, the ticketing company, merged with Live Nation, the event promoter, in 2010. The combined company, Live Nation Entertainment, controls about 80% of ticketing for major concert venues through long-term exclusive contracts.

It is the subject of perennial complaints from artists and consumers over its stranglehold on event promotion and for the laundry list of fees it tacks onto the face value of a ticket: service fees, convenience fees, handling fees and more.

Ticket-buying bots have long been an issue, so much so that in 2016 Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS for short), designed “to enforce posted event ticket purchasing limits.” For its part, Ticketmaster launched a “Verified Fan” program in 2017 in an effort to combat bot sales.

That didn’t prevent a widely publicized ticket-system meltdown when seats went on sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in 2022, which left many fans angry and empty-handed. Live Nation president Joe Berchtold was hauled before Congress, and in his opening statement he blamed the bots, saying Ticketmaster was “hit with three times the amount of bot traffic than we had ever experienced.”

In the wake of the Swift ticket debacle, her fans filed a class-action lawsuit and Congress launched an investigation. In 2024, the Department of Justice announced it was suing Live Nation Entertainment on antitrust grounds. That suit, joined by 30 states, is tentatively scheduled to go to trial in March 2026.

The new FTC action against Live Nation follows an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 31 — with Kid Rock on hand in the Oval Office as witness — titled “Combating Unfair Practices in the Live Entertainment Market.” The order did not name Ticketmaster or Live Nation, but directed the FTC to “rigorously enforce” the BOTS Act.

In its first related action, the FTC announced in August that it was suing a Maryland-based ticket broker for “allegedly using unlawful tactics to exceed ticket purchasing limits for many popular events, including Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and resell the tickets at significantly higher prices, generating millions in revenue.”

Now the FTC is taking on Live Nation itself. The company has not issued a public response to the suit and did not immediately respond to a request for comments from NerdWallet.

In the end, it’s classic economics, with demand for high-profile events outstripping supply. Concert-goers are increasingly willing to pay a premium for scarce seats, and ticket brokers are more than happy to oblige, sometimes by any means necessary.

“The bottom line is, I’m sure you know, none of this is great for the consumer who wants to get tickets at face-value prices,” says Dean Budnick, a writer and podcaster who co-authored the book “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped.”

While scalpers have always been around, the advent of the internet has forever changed the process of buying tickets for concerts and sporting events. “If you think about it, back in the old days, right, when you’re at Sears waiting for the Ticketron machine to spit out your ticket, or whatever it would be, there were still ticket brokers back then … but they tended to be local,” he says.

Now, thanks to online sales, it’s possible to buy tickets for major events virtually anywhere on the planet. That inflates demand, especially as brokers pile in (with the help of bots) to buy up seats. And with the rise of secondary marketplaces — not just Ticketmaster’s, but sites like StubHub and SeatGeek — tickets are also much easier for anyone to sell for a profit.

“There are professional brokers, but a lot of the issue comes from just amateurs, dilettantes, people who just want to make a little bit of extra money because they know they can if they can get a ticket to a high-profile event,” because they can easily turn around and sell it, Budnick says. “And that puts pressure on ticket inventory.”

Music and sports fans hoping for relief from the current state of affairs will likely need to be patient. Legal actions, like the antitrust suit or the FTC’s latest action, will take time to play out in court. And Budnick notes that the BOTS Act is hard to enforce. In fact, this year’s actions are the first attempts to enforce a law that has been on the books for almost a decade, he says.

But he also pointed to a new law that went into effect in Maine this week as a potential model for other states. Among other measures, the law prevents resellers from adding more than 10% to the original ticket price — which could keep resale prices down and remove incentives for brokers and other resellers.

At the federal level, the House in April passed the TICKET Act — that stands for Transparency In Charges for Key Events Ticketing — that would require “ticket sellers (including sellers on the secondary market) for concerts, performances, sporting events, and similar activities to clearly and prominently disclose the total ticket price for the event at the time the ticket is first displayed to an individual.”

The bill would also prohibit ticket sellers from selling or advertising tickets that they don’t possess. And if you didn’t realize that speculative sales are a thing, check secondary sites like StubHub for the thousands of “ghost tickets” for next year’s World Cup, for which no tickets have been released by organizing body FIFA. The Senate has not yet taken up the measure.