The president of Ticketmaster responds to accusations that the company helps scalpers

Ticketmaster president Jared Smith seems like a really decent guy. I know because I had a chance to interview him at Canadian Music Week earlier this year.

He’s now the person who has to tackle the mess created by the CBC/Toronto Star investigation into TradeDesk, the Ticketmaster division that works with secondary sellers and scalpers.

While the whole interview with Billboard can be found here, this is the section that will probably jump out at you.

Was the story accurate?

The story is predicated on misinformation and a misunderstanding that paints the company very differently than it actually is. That’s frustrating. That being said, there’s clearly some things that we’re not doing well enough. We’ll learn from it and we’ll make some changes. I’m happy to make those changes. We think we should make those changes.

[…]

Does Ticketmaster allow the resellers it works with to pull tickets before fans get a crack at good seats?

We do not provide preference in any way for any group of people, professional or otherwise, nor do we provide tools or programs that allow them to buy tickets in bulk or gain an advantage over fans. Period. We do not do that. We never have. We never will. TradeDesk is an inventory management tool that allows professional sellers, which do not cheat, to pull all of the inventory that they have, which is mostly gathered in very, very legitimate ways. There’s lot of these tools out there; Ticketmaster is not the only one. StubHub has product called Ticket Utils and VividSeats has product called SkyBox.

If you’re truly interested in this story, you need to keep reading.

Ticketmaster also published this on their blog.