Ticketmaster has responded to the US senators who sent a stern letter last month following the US Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against the Live Nation ticketing company. That legal action accuses Ticketmaster of colluding with ticket touts who use illegal tactics to access tickets to resell at hiked-up prices, and the senators’ letter set out a number of concerns based on the FTC’s allegations.
In response, Live Nation’s EVP Of Regulatory Affairs, Dan Wall, denies any wrongdoing and insists that the FTC’s legal claims are based on a “fundamentally novel and expansionist view” of the relevant laws, in particular the US Better Online Ticket Sales Act. Live Nation and Ticketmaster, he adds, have always prioritised “supporting artists and fans and protecting the integrity of the live entertainment industry”.
However, according to Billboard, Wall also reveals that Ticketmaster will be shutting down its sometimes controversial ticket inventory tool TradeDesk and will make it much harder for touts to operate a plethora of accounts on the main Ticketmaster primary ticketing platform.
These developments are a further sign that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are distancing themselves from the ticket touting - or ticket scalping - business within the US market.
Ticketmaster shut down its ticket resale platforms in Europe back in 2018 after ticket touting became too toxic in the European market and Live Nation often found itself in conflict with the rest of the music industry in any political debates around secondary ticketing.
However, it remained much more involved in ticket resale in the US, but more recently has been increasingly critical of ticket touts and publicly supportive of more regulation of resale under US law.
Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján sent their letter to Live Nation CFO Joe Berchtold, who previously testified during a Congressional session on ticketing.
They noted that Berchtold told senators during that session that the live giant “believes that the artist-fan connection is the foundation of the live entertainment industry, the source of nearly all commercial value, and the number one thing that public policy should protect”.
And yet, the senator’s letter went on, the FTC lawsuit claims that “Ticketmaster coordinated with ticket brokers allowing them to obtain millions of dollars of tickets which they then resold on the secondary market”. In doing so, the ticketing company has “turned a blind eye” to touts who are violating the BOTS Act, which prohibits touts from using various tactics and technologies to source tickets to resell.
The FTC’s legal filing actually quotes an internal email from Ticketmaster in which one senior exec overtly admits that the company “turns a blind eye as a matter of policy” to dodgy touting tactics, so that it can profit by charging a commission on the resale.
But in his letter, Wall rejects the claim that Ticketmaster has “turned a blind eye” to dodgy conduct in order to boost its commissions on the resale of touted tickets, calling such allegations “nonsensical”.
He stresses that resale revenues account for “less than 2% of Live Nation’s total revenue” and that secondary ticketing is a part of the wider business where the live giant’s market share is below 20%. “Our incentives are plainly to favour artists and fans”, he writes.
As for the exec quoted in the FTC’s lawsuit admitting to the blind eye turning policy, that quote is taken out of context by the government agency, he says. It “picked nine words out of context and changed the policy those words addressed to create that misimpression”.
Further quoting the FTC’s litigation, the senators’ letter also took issue with Ticketmaster’s TradeDesk system which, they wrote, “enables brokers to track and aggregate tickets purchased from multiple Ticketmaster accounts into a single interface for simpler resale management”.
Wall insists that the existence of TradeDesk - a ticket inventory management system for resellers similar to those offered by rivals like StubHub and Vivid Seats - does not suggest Ticketmaster has ever colluded with the touts or endorsed their dodgy tactics. However, he reveals, Ticketmaster will nevertheless be removing TradeDesk “from the market” in order to avoid “reputational harm”.
The senators’ letter also honed in on the claim that just five ticket touts between them controlled thousands of Ticketmaster accounts which they used to buy “nearly a quarter of a million tickets”. Ticketmaster knew this and “continued to offer and sell tickets to these very same brokers purchased by circumventing Ticketmaster’s” own rules limiting ticket purchases for any one show.
As with TradeDesk, Wall takes the position that none of that violated any laws or constituted bad conduct on Ticketmaster’s part, but at the same time the ticketing company is making changes. Basically by further restricting how touts interact with its primary ticketing platform.
Wall says that moving forward Ticketmaster US will limit every entity - including professional touts - to a single verified account, with each account requiring a unique taxpayer ID. This will end the practice of touts operating numerous accounts, a long-standing practice which was never illegal - Wall insists - but which is probably now in need of reform.
Elsewhere in his letter Wall restates the long-standing position of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, that they are actually doing more than any other company to tackle dodgy tactics and practices in the secondary ticketing market.
That includes combatting the use of special software - or bots - to hoover up tickets for in-demand events. It’s those bots, Wall adds, that the BOTS Act was meant to tackle, which is why the FTC’s claim that Ticketmaster has violated the act is plain wrong.
It remains to be seen how the senators - let alone the courts - respond to Live Nation’s arguments against the FTC's various allegations. But either way, Wall’s letter suggests that Live Nation won’t be standing in the way of any ramping up of regulation or restrictions in relation to ticketing touting in the US.
Instead it will put its own new restrictions in place - reluctantly or otherwise - while supporting various proposals in Congress around ticketing regulation, providing it’s ticket touting that is being regulated.