Ticketmaster said that it would limit “everyone and every entity” to only one account, while it is defending its business practices in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
Responding to a letter from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), Live Nation executive vice president Daniel M. Wall wrote that the “emotional force of the FTC‘s lawsuit comes from the fact that some ticket brokers today simply have too many accounts. It doesn’t matter whether that’s lawful or lawful. What started as a reasonable and acceptable level of behavior has been abused, and today it is growing exponentially through digitally exploited means. It’s unfair to artists and fans and it is time to do something about it.”
Wall acknowledged that with the new policy, “we know scalpers will do everything in their power to undermine us.” But he wrote that will be countered by AI tools and identity verification technology. Excess accounts will be canceled “in due course,” and brokers will not be allowed to post more tickets on the Ticketmaster resale marketplace than the post limit. Ticketmaster will require that every account that wishes to post tickets for resale have a unique taxpayer identification number.
Wall also noted that brokers have had multiple accounts for “a very long time,” before Ticketmaster entered the secondary marketplace in 2014.
The FTC sued Ticketmaster and parent Live Nation last month, claiming that the company has “tacitly worked” with scalpers, “allowing them to unlawfully purchase millions of dollars in tickets in the primary market, so that Defendants can extract more profit for themselves when reselling those tickets on the secondary market.”
In his letter, Wall wrote that the FTC lawsuit “presents a distorted view of the facts and the law,” including the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. The law prohibits the circumvention of security measures used online by a ticket issuer.
Wall wrote to the lawmakers that “we can assure to that today every concert ticket that Ticketmaster is asked to distribute is sold through onsales that are open to fans. None are secretly sold or transferred to ticket brokers. To answer one of your questions directly, no, neither Live Nation nor Ticketmaster ever ‘purposefully relax enforcement of ticket limits for certain buyers or brokers for financial gain.’”
Wall also pushed back on the FTC’s characterization of TradeDesk, their inventory management system, as enabling technical support for ticket “harvesting.” He wrote that TradeDesk “has no functionality to buy primary tickets, and does “not in any way ‘enable bots to buy up and hoard massive amounts of tickets.’” Yet Wall wrote that Ticketmaster was removing TradeDesk functionality from the market, as they had come to the conclusion that the “reputational harm from having to explain and defend TradeDesk exceeds its value.”
Wall wrote that the claim that Ticketmaster was turning “a blind eye” to violations of the BOTS Act was “particularly frustrating,” noting that the company has invested more than $1 billion in ticketing technology including anti-bot and fraud detection measures. He wrote that secondary ticketing accounts for about 3% of Live Nation’s revenue, and returns on fees on concert ticket reslae is less than 2% of Live Nation’s revenue.
“Ticketmaster’s market share in concert ticket resale is also less than 20%, meaning that over 80% of the time a concert ticket gets resold, some other marketplace collects resale fees,” he wrote.
