Live Nation and Ticketmaster File to Dismiss FTC Ticket Resale Lawsuit

Live Nation and Ticketmaster have filed to dismiss the lawsuit brought against them by the Federal Trade Commission and seven U.S. states in September. In a motion submitted on Jan. 6, the companies allege that the FTC’s case constitutes a misinterpretation of the 2016 Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, deployed in an “egregious instance of agency overreach,” per Variety.

The FTC’s wide-ranging suit accused Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary of collaborating with resellers to inflate ticket prices by allowing brokers to exceed stated purchase limits by creating multiple accounts with falsified information. After enabling these direct BOTS Act violations, the companies purportedly facilitated the movement of illicitly procured tickets to the secondary market through the TradeDesk platform. Now, Live Nation and Ticketmaster argue that the FTC’s application of the BOTS Act is an inversion of its intended purpose.

“This statute is designed to help ticket issuers like Ticketmaster combat ticket harvesting and scalping, ensuring that tickets are accessible to genuine fans,” the companies’ council wrote. “Plaintiffs now ask this Court to take the unprecedented step of applying this law against a ticket issuer for its operation of a resale platform.”

Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s filing goes on to redirect attention to the scalpers themselves. Just as the former’s Executive Vice President Daniel M. Wall asserted “Ticketmaster does more than anyone to fight bots and get tickets into the hands of real fans” while folding the controversial TradeDesk tool in October, Tuesday’s motion denounced resellers that “persist in using technology to step in front of fans to obtain an outsized share of tickets and resell them at marked up prices in a multibillion-dollar resale market.” 

The FTC’s suit argued that Live Nation and Ticketmaster have deliberately failed to adapt to scalpers’ use of methods like false email addresses, alternate SIM cards and IP-masking web browsers, and bolstered the claim with obtained internal communications. In one excerpt, a Ticketmaster executive is said to have admitted in an email to Live Nation leadership that the companies can identify brokers bypassing security measures, but “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy.” Another email concerns the companies’ resistance to adopting preventive technologies like third-party identification, which an employee wrote was “too effective.” Wall argues that the agency selectively misquoted those messages out of context.

One charge from the initial suit left unaddressed by Live Nation’s petition for dismissal is that of deceptive pricing–a violation of both the FTC’s Junk Fees Rule and the TICKET Act currently awaiting review by the Senate–and the companies’ continuation of the practices, after internal research indicated that consumers were less likely to purchase when presented with the total price of tickets upfront.

Regardless of the outcome of the filing, Live Nation’s legal battles persist in several other cases, including a 2024 suit by the U.S. Justice Department alleging violations of antitrust laws. Variety notes that when the previous administration’s Justice Department was replaced by Trump’s re-election, Live Nation’s stock price spiked. After Trump’s executive order last March that called for the use of “all lawful authority” to combat price gouging and encouraged the FTC to “rigorously enforce” the BOTS Act, Live Nation added Trump appointee Richard Grenell to its board of directors. Grenell is also the current president of the Kennedy Center, championing its renaming as the Trump-Kennedy Center.

Meanwhile, the UK government has voted to ban ticket resale above face value. Read more about that landmark decision here, and similar legislation under consideration in Quebec here.