Imagine you’re buying a ticket to see your favorite band live in concert, only to discover that the price you saw isn’t what you’re paying.
That’s what the U.S. government says has been happening at Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Now the federal government, along with seven other states, wants them to be held accountable.
The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a coalition of states have filed a lawsuit against the largest entertainment companies in the world, LiveNation and its ticketing arm, Ticketmaster.
One of the central charges of the complaint, filed by the FTC on Sept. 18, is what regulators call “bait-and-switch” pricing, where tickets are advertised at a modest face value, but fees and mark-ups aren’t disclosed until late into the ticket buying process, further raising the price.
The FTC claims that these fees have inflated the price of tickets anywhere from 24% to 44% of what consumers believed they were paying. To put this into scale, consumers paid $16.4 billion in mandatory fees on purchases from 2019 to 2024.
The FTC’s complaint also alleges that users purchased millions of tickets through the primary market and resold them, using Ticketmaster’s own resale platform, at much higher prices. Ticketmaster collected fees from both the original user purchase and the resale, an exercise critics argue effectively equal to “triple dipping.”
The lawsuit cites several different laws that LiveNation violated, which are section 5(a) of the FTC Act, which bans deceptive acts or practices, and the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, which aims to prevent the avoiding of ticket purchase limits through bot software.
The states joining this suit, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia, bring additional consumer protection claims under respective laws in their states.
Now to ask the question, how did we get here?
The foundation for this lawsuit began back in 2022, when singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s Eras tour had millions of fans locked out of presale access, enduring long waits in queues as they watched tickets vanish into the hands of resellers, who would resell them at, on average,10 times the price.
This not only prompted congressional hearings but drew widespread attention to Ticketmaster’s monopoly in live entertainment, effectively making fans of Taylor Swift the face of a growing movement calling for reform.
Swift herself said she was “pissed off” by the debacle, adding, “It’s excruciating for me to watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
Swift is not the only artist who’s voiced frustration in this arena. Rock band Pearl Jam famously tried to boycott Ticketmaster in the 90s. Following its failure, guitarist Stone Gossard said, “We knew this was going to be a battle for the soul of live music. We wanted to make tickets more affordable and fair, but the system is stacked against us.”
What does this mean for consumers? It means everything.
In the last five years, Americans spent more than $80 billion buying tickets with Ticketmaster. That, combined with ticketing control of 80% of major venues, allows the company to have both the power and the incentive to limit enforcement of ticket limits when it suits their benefits.
In a statement, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson emphasized how live entertainment needs to be accessible to everyone. “It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show,” he said.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster have not yet publicly responded in detail to the allegations. The lawsuit asks for a permanent injunction of these behaviors, civil penalties, a return of money gained through the platform’s inflated fees and other relief deemed appropriate by the court.
The implications of this lawsuit will be felt for years to come.
If wrongdoing is found, the live music industry is changed forever and a multi-decade-long monopoly is brought down to its knees.
If wrongdoing is not found, then LiveNations’ stronghold over live entertainment grows, and their dominance will continue to go unchecked.
This case likely will not be settled for another few months, but if you are a fan of live events, you need to tune into the results of what is to come, because it could change everything.
