What’s behind the new Ticketmaster probe and investigation? Let’s take a look.
People love to hate Ticketmaster, usually for the wrong reasons, but let’s not get into that right now. There are, however, reasons to be extremely suspicious of certain things.
Back in 2018, a joint investigation between the CBC and The Toronto Star uncovered something called “TradeDesk,” a tool created by Ticketmaster to facilitate bulk buying of concert tickets by certain brokers. The investigation resulted in a class action suit in Canada. This has now blown up into an into a new probe in the US by the Federal Trade Commission.
“The FT alleges that in public, Ticketmaster maintains that its business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits. But in private, Ticketmaster acknowledged that its business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set.”
Note that last line: Artists set the price of a ticket, not Ticketmaster. But I digress.
The FTC suit looks a lot like what was uncovered in Canada. An internal spreadsheet was discovered listing five ticket resellers who controlled 6,345 individual Ticketmaster accounts and had 246,407 tickets in their possession. All these accounts were required to get around the standard X-tickets-per-customer rules. And yes, brokers such as these use bots. Ticketmaster is alleged to look the other way, even though the company’s terms of service explicity say that use of ticket-buying bots is verboten.
The Canadian Competition Bureau looked into this and found no criminal charges were warranted, although they did have an issue with Ticketmaster’s hidden fees. The company settled for $6 million.
We’ll see what happens with the US investigation. Meanwhile, if you bought a resale ticket on Ticketmaster at anytime since January 1, 2015–and there are as many as 900,000 people who did that–watch your email for news.
(Via The Toronto Star)
