FTC Sues Live Nation, Ticketmaster for Allowing Ticket Brokers to Break Its Rules for Profit: ‘Directly Inflates Prices’

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC ) has filed a lengthy lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, seeking a permanent injunction against what it describes as years of “systemic unfair and deceptive practices.”

Joined by seven state attorneys general and the Utah Division of Consumer Protection, the 84-page federal complaint filed in the Central District of California seeks monetary relief, civil penalties and restitution for alleged violations of the FTC Act, the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (also known as the BOTS Act) and various state consumer protection statutes.

The lawsuit seeks to penalize Live Nation for failing to enforce the BOTS Act — an eight-year-old law the FTC is charged with enforcing but has only enforced two times in nearly a decade.

The lawsuit represents a second major legal action against the company by federal and state officials in two years — in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Live Nation on anti-competitive grounds, arguing its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster gave the company an unfair monopoly of the concert business. Today’s FTC complaint argues that Live Nation and Ticketmaster control “roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing” and abuse that dominance through deceptive pricing, tacit collusion with ticket brokers and violations of federal ticketing law.

The lawsuit alleges three main categories of unlawful conduct by Live Nation: deceptive, or bait-and-switch ticket pricing; collusion with ticket brokers to evade ticket limits; and what it calls “systematic violations of the BOTS Act.” Each example of unlawful conduct, according to the complaint, directly inflates prices, harms artists’ intent to keep ticket costs affordable and “extracts billions in additional profits for the defendants.”

Ticketmaster has long received complaints about its drip pricing, which means customers view one price while shopping for tickets and then are presented with a higher price, sometimes as much as 30% higher, when fees are added. In recent months, however, the company has been leading efforts to promote all-in pricing, which would show the entire price of a ticket at the beginning of checkout.

“Defendants’ deceptive price display was no accident,” the lawsuit, written primarily by FTC Attorney Elizabeth Scott, alleges. “The design resulted from years of internal testing designed by Defendants’ employees that shows that Defendants’ revenues increase when their price display is, in Ticketmaster’s words, ‘less transparent.’”

According to one internal study from 2015 cited in the lawsuit, a Ticketmaster executive acknowledged that “‘the less transparent the higher the conversion,’ concluding that ‘this means we’re headed towards less transparency.’”

“Not until May 2025, deep into the FTC’s investigation — and just before the effective date of the FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, which authorizes the FTC to seek civil penalties and other monetary relief against violators — did Defendants announce their intention to incorporate fees into listed ticket prices,” the lawsuit explains.

The second major allegation is that Ticketmaster publicly blames scalpers and bots for high resale prices while privately allowing (and benefiting from) brokers’ mass purchases of tickets.

Artists typically set per-event limits (4to 10 tickets per buyer), but Ticketmaster fails to enforce them, the complaint alleges, noting “Defendants routinely allow ticket brokers to exceed ticket limits.”

One broker allegedly purchased 772 Coldplay tickets for $81,000 and resold them for $170,000, and 612 Chris Stapleton tickets for $47,000 and resold them for $89,000.

The complaint alleges Ticketmaster not only turned a blind eye but sometimes aided brokers, even issuing warnings about upcoming account enforcement changes so they could “consolidate illegally obtained tickets,” the lawsuit alleges.

“To evade Ticketmaster’s enforcement measures, brokers routinely create hundreds or thousands of Ticketmaster accounts,” the lawsuit alleges, including one reseller who purchased or created 13,000 Ticketmaster accounts over a four-year period.

“Ticketmaster forecast that in 2020, alone, more than five million of the concert tickets that it would offer for resale would be tickets purchased over ticket limits,” the lawsuit alleges. “This was more than 55% of the concert tickets it anticipated would be listed by brokers.”

Ticketmaster has “significantly increased their sale of secondary market concert tickets, from 3.8 million tickets in 2019 to over 20 million in 2024,” the lawsuit alleges, noting that in 2023, 78 percent of resale tickets sold on Ticketmaster were listed by ticket brokers.

Company officials were aware that brokers were using a number of different technology tools to circumvent ticket purchase limits on the site and either looked the other way or provided “technological support for brokers who exceed ticket limits to list the tickets for resale by Ticketmaster,” the lawsuit alleges. That includes the use of tools like TradeDesk, which ticket brokers use to upload tickets to Ticketmaster’s resale platform.

“A September 2018 Ticketmaster presentation reported that each TradeDesk account was associated with, on average, approximately 200 Ticketmaster accounts,” the lawsuit continues, a violation of Ticketmaster’s own rules limiting users to one account per person.

“As a Ticketmaster executive vice president explained to Ticketmaster’s executive team and Live Nation’s President and CFO in the wake of the undercover reporting on TradeDesk,” the lawsuit alleges “Defendants ‘turn a blind eye’ to brokers’ circumvention of their enforcement measures and follow a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ approach to brokers’ blatantly violative conduct.”

Publicly, however, company officials insist that Ticketmaster “does not turn a blind eye” to “patterns of behavior that indicate unlawful ticket purchases,” according to the lawsuit.

FTC attorneys argue that Ticketmaster benefits from what it calls “triple dipping,” collecting fees “when the broker buys the ticket, again when the broker lists it for resale on Ticketmaster, and a third time when the fan buys the marked-up resale ticket.” According to the FTC lawsuit, Ticketmaster generated $3.7 billion in fees from its resale marketplace from 2019 to 2024.

The complaint stresses that the practices harm not just fans but also artists, undercutting artists’ own efforts to set affordable prices.

“Defendants’ unlawful conduct and tacit coordination with brokers injures fans, who have paid far more than the advertised ticket price,” the complaint alleges, and “injures artists, who set ticket limits that they understand [Ticketmaster] will implement, only to be thwarted by [Ticketmaster’s] choice to allow brokers to evade them.”

According to the complaint, $82.6 billion was spent by consumers on Ticketmaster from 2019 to 2024, including $16.4 billion paid in mandatory fees during that period, along with $986 million collected in resale seller fees and $3.7 billion in resale fees charged to fans. The FTC is asking the court for a permanent injunction prohibiting Ticketmaster/Live Nation from “continuing deceptive practices” and is demanding civil penalties under the FTC Act and the BOTS Act, along with consumer restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys’ fees and costs for participating states.

Shortly after the lawsuit was announced, Stephen Parker, executive director for the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) released a statement, said in part, “Today’s lawsuit has given credibility to what fans, artists, and independent stages have believed for years: Live Nation and Ticketmaster exploit their dominance not just in concert promotion and primary ticketing, but in the resale market as well.”

Parker noted that “This is not just bad business; it is deception and abuse of monopoly power. By turning a blind eye to scalpers, even giving them the tools to bypass limits and harvest tickets, Live Nation has acted as the promoter, the primary ticket seller, the artists’ manager, and the scalper.”

He added, “Independent venues and promoters are on the frontlines of this broken system, and it is fans and artists who ultimately pay the price. We applaud the FTC for bringing this case. It further bolsters the U.S. Department of Justice and 40 state attorneys general antitrust case against Live Nation.”

Officials with the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO) also released a statement, saying, “Without commenting on the specific charges, NITO applauds the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to reform an unfair ticketing ecosystem that too often does not serve consumers or artists. Changes are needed that address excessive fees, availability of tickets for fans at fair prices and keeping the process aligned with artists interests that benefit their fans.”

Billboard reached out to Live Nation for comment but did not receive a response by press time.