Quote
SomeTorontoGirl
‘Dynamic pricing’ was runner up for Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, losing out to ‘Brain Rot’.

Word of the Year is ‘… intended to be “a word or expression that reflects a defining theme from the past 12 months.’ Apparently someone at Oxford has dealt with TicketBastards too.

[www.kxii.com]

I thought dynamic pricing caused brain rot. Actually that’s pretty sad that I was word of the year.

Quote
SomeTorontoGirl
‘Dynamic pricing’ was runner up for Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, losing out to ‘Brain Rot’.

Word of the Year is ‘… intended to be “a word or expression that reflects a defining theme from the past 12 months.’ Apparently someone at Oxford has dealt with TicketBastards too.

[www.kxii.com]

I thought dynamic pricing caused brain rot. Actually that’s pretty sad that it was word of the year.

ROCKMAN

Seems that TicketBastards are coming under some scrutiny in the US, as the result of an investigation by the Toronto Star. I recently had to re-sell a pair of tickets for the first time and learned that TicketBastards get a service fee on the original purchase, on the resale and on the second purchase. Triple fee. AND they do not pay the reseller until after the event, which in my case is 4 months (I have another week to wait), so they are earning interest on those funds for months - so there is little motivation for them to abandon this model. So… yeah, I’m glad they’re under the microscope and hope they get roasted! Here’s the article.


The Star went undercover to expose how Ticketmaster colludes with scalpers. The probe is now at the heart of a major FTC lawsuit

The joint Toronto Star/CBC investigation exposed Ticketmaster employees reassuring undercover scalper that they could use bots to gobble up box office tickets — in breach of both Ticketmaster’s terms of use and U.S. and Canadian law.

By Marco Chown OvedClimate Change Reporter
A Toronto Star/CBC investigation into Ticketmaster’s collusion with scalpers to resell hundreds of thousands of tickets to sports and music events at inflated prices forms the backbone of a new U.S. consumer-protection lawsuit against the world’s biggest ticketing company.

We went undercover as ticket scalpers — and Ticketmaster offered to help us do business

The groundbreaking undercover investigation featured reporters, posing as scalpers, who received assurances from Ticketmaster employees that they could use bots with impunity to mass purchase box office tickets well beyond the limit for regular customers — in breach of both Ticketmaster’s terms of use and U.S. and Canadian law. Ticketmaster even designed a special platform for scalpers to facilitate reselling tickets bought using hundreds of different accounts and invited the reporters to sign up.

Filed last week in U.S. federal court, the new lawsuit alleges that Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation used deceptive pricing tactics that ultimately cost consumers billions in inflated prices and fees for tickets illegally acquired by the brokers.

Brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and seven U.S. states, the lawsuit is the latest in a series of cases, including multiple class actions certified in Canada, that build upon information revealed in the Star/CBC investigation.

“The FTC alleges that in public, Ticketmaster maintains that its business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits. But in private, Ticketmaster acknowledged that its business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set,” the U.S. consumer protection agency wrote in a press release.

The FTC is an independent agency of the U.S. government that is tasked with enforcing civil antitrust laws and guarding against unfair and deceptive business practices. Neither the FTC nor Ticketmaster responded to a request for comment.

Hidden camera video from the Star/CBC investigation has been cited in several lawsuits, with lawyers saying it has been particularly helpful to have evidence straight from the mouths of Ticketmaster employees.

“You guys were the ones who broke this thing open,” said Jean-Marc Leclerc, lead counsel for the class action suit filed in Ontario, which received certification last April. “It was your investigation that gave us all of the inside information, the hidden camera videos with the Ticketmaster people.”

In 2018, reporters from the Star and CBC travelled to a convention in Las Vegas posing as small-time Canadian ticket scalpers. They approached the Ticketmaster booth and listened as sales staff pitched a proprietary software program called TradeDesk, designed to help bulk buyers resell thousands of tickets.

Hidden camera video from the Star/CBC investigation has been cited in several lawsuits, with lawyers saying it has been particularly helpful to have evidence straight from the mouths of Ticketmaster employees.

“You guys were the ones who broke this thing open,” said Jean-Marc Leclerc, lead counsel for the class action suit filed in Ontario, which received certification last April. “It was your investigation that gave us all of the inside information, the hidden camera videos with the Ticketmaster people.”

In 2018, reporters from the Star and CBC travelled to a convention in Las Vegas posing as small-time Canadian ticket scalpers. They approached the Ticketmaster booth and listened as sales staff pitched a proprietary software program called TradeDesk, designed to help bulk buyers resell thousands of tickets.

The records show that Ticketmaster has “internal records showing that they know full well the resellers have hundreds of accounts (and) … saying if we restrict these guys from buying tickets, this is going to have a massive impact on our revenues,” Leclerc said.

After the Star/CBC report, the Canadian Competition Bureau launched an investigation into TradeDesk and the use of bots, but later found they did not breach federal law. An unrelated complaint centred on Ticketmaster’s hidden fees, was settled earlier this year for $6 million.

The use of automated computer software to get around ticket purchase limits is banned by many states and provinces. The use of multiple accounts to buy tickets for a single person or company is banned by Ticketmaster’s own terms of use.

In Ontario, the Ticket Sales Act has a wide range of potential penalties, right up to a full refund of the price paid for a resale ticket.

“So if you paid 500 bucks for your Taylor Swift tickets, if it is found that Ticketmaster knew that bots had been used to purchase those tickets, there is a potential for an outright refund of the $500 you paid,” Leclerc said.

The next step for the class action will be an email, sent out in the coming months to Canadians (excluding residents of B.C., who have a separate lawsuit) who bought a resale ticket on Ticketmaster since Jan 1, 2015 — an estimated 700,000 to 900,000 people.

[www.thestar.com]

You’ll really love this. Within the last month whenever you go to Ticketmaster, it makes you agree that you will not be part of any class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster anymore. You have to sue them individually. Sounds like they knew this was coming down the road. It really is disgusting and I don’t know why the government (yes, I know I can’t count on the US government) can’t see what’s really going on and do something about this atrocity that is Ticketmaster.

[legal.ticketmaster.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2025-09-26 06:03 by NashvilleBlues.

Quote
NashvilleBlues
You’ll really love this. Within the last month whenever you go to Ticketmaster, it makes you agree that you will not be part of any class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster anymore. You have to sue them individually. Sounds like they knew this was coming down the road. It really is disgusting and I don’t know why the government (yes, I know I can’t count on the US government) can’t see what’s really going on and do something about this atrocity that is Ticketmaster.

[legal.ticketmaster.com]

There's always Live Nation.

That's a joke.

I guess we’ll see if this actually changes anything… colour me skeptical.



It’s one reason Blue Jays World Series tickets cost so much — and something Ticketmaster’s parent company is looking to change

In a letter to U.S. senators, Live Nation said it would no longer allow people to hold multiple Ticketmaster accounts and would shut down its TradeDesk platform.

By Marco Chown Oved, Climate Change Reporter

Even for those who logged in seconds after World Series tickets went on sale, the virtual lineup at Ticketmaster often stretched to more than 100,000 people.

It’s no secret that many of those “people” in line are actually bots — automated computer programs — that can click far faster than any human.

By the time many Blue Jays fans got through to the actual box office, tickets with a face value of $494 were going for at least $1,895 because they had already been purchased and were being offered up for resale. And that’s the absolute low end — there were tickets available for five times that price as well.

What was once touted as a way to help people get rid of seats to concerts and sporting events they couldn’t attend has become big business, with technologically adept scalpers employing banks of computers to gobble up hundreds of thousands of tickets and sell them for big profits.

Ticketmaster, which has faced public ire, class-action lawsuits and investigations by the Canadian Competition Bureau and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for facilitating the secondary resale market, now says it will put an end to this activity.

Not because it’s illegal or wrong. But because it’s causing “reputational harm.”

Some ticket brokers today “simply have too many accounts,” Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, said in a letter sent to U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján last week.

“It doesn’t matter whether that’s lawful or unlawful. What started as a reasonable and acceptable level of behaviour 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,” stated the letter, which was obtained by several U.S. media outlets.

The Star has not seen the letter. Ticketmaster and Live Nation did not respond to questions for this story.

According to media accounts, the letter says Ticketmaster will ban all users from having multiple accounts by forcing ticket resellers to divulge their Social Security numbers or Taxpayer ID numbers. It will also discontinue its TradeDesk platform, a specialized program developed to help scalpers manage their inventory of tickets purchased through multiple different Ticketmaster accounts.

“I think that Ticketmaster is concerned about the ongoing legal battles that have become both costly and a distraction,” said Richard Powers, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who studies sports marketing. Live Nation has claimed in the past that revenues from the resellers program is small, he added, “it just may no longer be worth the hassle.”

The TradeDesk platform was revealed publicly more than seven years ago, when reporters from the Star and CBC went undercover to pose as scalpers while Ticketmaster employees offered to help them break the rules to obtain tickets and resell them.

Public outrage ensued, and class action lawsuits were filed on both sides of the border, although a quick investigation by the Canadian Competition Bureau cleared Ticketmaster of wrongdoing, finding TradeDesk did not breach federal law. An unrelated complaint centred on Ticketmaster’s hidden fees was settled earlier this year for $6 million. The class actions remain ongoing.

For years, the issue of exorbitant ticket prices has continued to rear its head as fans, finding it nearly impossible to obtain tickets from the box office, instead resort to paying five or even 10 times more for resale tickets on StubHub or Ticketmaster.

Despite staging six shows in Toronto last fall, Taylor Swift was unable to get tickets straight into the hands of her fans, who had no choice but to pay up to $33,000 to see her live.

Things came to a head last month, when Live Nation found itself in the crosshairs of a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit in the United States. The federal complaint alleged Ticketmaster facilitated the growth of the secondary ticket market by turning a blind eye to “brokers” who used multiple accounts and bots to harvest hundreds of thousands of tickets to concerts and sporting events. Ticketmaster then helped these brokers sell their tickets and profited when it got another fee on the second sale. This was not only a breach of federal law, the FTC complaint, which extensively cited the Star/CBC investigation, alleges, it ultimately cost consumers billions of dollars.

In response, Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice president and chief regulatory counsel, penned the letter, stating much of the FTC lawsuit is “plainly false.”

The FTC’s allegations provide “a distorted view of the facts and the law,” Wall wrote, claiming Ticketmaster has done “more than anyone else in the industry to fight the bad actors” that exploit the ticket resale market.

“Ticketmaster is an industry leader in the fight against bots and ticket scalping,” he wrote. “Among its many initiatives, Ticketmaster has invested more than $1 billion in ticketing technology, including anti-bot technology, fraud detection and ticket security. Invented rotating barcodes and digital ticketing to stop screenshot resale. Pioneered SafeTix and the smart queue digital waiting rooms to get tickets in the hands of real fans rather than bad actors. Developed powerful new technologies designed to prevent inauthentic account creation and provide for ongoing account validation.”

In order to further crack down on brokers, Ticketmaster will require any account “that wishes to post tickets for resale on Ticketmaster have a unique Taxpayer Identification Number,” the letter stated.

The changes are supposed to be implemented immediately, according to the letter, dated Oct. 17.

[www.thestar.com]

There is hope! Cruel, cruel hope!

Reselling tickets for profit to be outlawed in UK government crackdown

Touts, and ordinary consumers, will no longer be able to charge anything more than price at which they bought ticket

Rob Davies
Mon 17 Nov 2025 17.53 GMT

Reselling tickets for profit is to be outlawed under plans due to be announced this week, the Guardian has learned, as the government goes ahead with a long-awaited crackdown on touts and resale platforms such as Viagogo and StubHub.

Ministers had been considering allowing touts – and ordinary consumers – to sell on a ticket for up to 30% above the original face value, as part of a consultation process that ended earlier this year.

However, the Guardian understands that reselling a ticket at anything more than the price at which it was originally bought will be banned.

The decision, due to be announced on Wednesday, comes a week after dozens of world-renowned artists – including Radiohead, Dua Lipa and Coldplay – issued an open plea to Keir Starmer to make good on Labour’s general election manifesto pledge by stopping “pernicious” touts.

Under the plan, which could form part of next year’s King’s speech, anyone selling a ticket will not be allowed to charge more than they paid for it. Resale platforms will be allowed to charge fees on top of that price.

These extras will also be limited, to ensure that they can’t be inflated artificially to offset profits forfeited owing to the legislation. The scale of the ceiling on service fees is yet to be determined.

The ban will also govern social media sites, which resale platforms have claimed would offer unregulated and potentially fraudulent tickets if legislation squeezes online ticket exchanges out of the market.

Anyone reselling a ticket will also be prohibited from offering more tickets than they could have procured under limits set by the original box office company.

A licensing system for ticket resale companies, one of the options that the government review considered, will not be adopted. Resale platforms will be legally liable if sellers using their site do not comply with the law, which will be enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority.

Acts including Ed Sheeran and the Pixies have repeatedly lashed out at touts exploiting their fans, while this year’s Oasis reunion tour attracted legions of professional ticket “traders”.

A Guardian investigation found hundreds of tickets being sold by professional “traders”, including three UK touts listing dozens of Oasis tickets for a combined £26,000.

Overseas businesses have also targeted the lucrative UK market for live events. One Cyprus-based business advertised 1,596 tickets through StubHub alone for the Oasis tour.

The consumer group Which? published further details on Thursday of exorbitant prices charged by touts on such platforms in locations such as Dubai, Singapore and the US.

Oasis tickets for Wembley Stadium shows were listed for £3,498.85 on StubHub and £4,442 on Viagogo, while a Coldplay ticket, also for Wembley, was £814.52 on

Some of the UK’s biggest touts planned their own political influence campaign at a secret meeting last year revealed in footage filmed by the Guardian.

In practice, there are question marks about whether sites such as Viagogo and StubHub would continue to operate in the UK if they cannot benefit from taking a cut of the huge markups charged by touts.

Face-value ticket resale sites, such as Twickets and Ticketmaster’s internal exchange system, have sprung up in recent years to offer an alternative to for-profit resale platforms.

The Guardian has regularly exposed the business practices of the ticket resale industry, including how the UK’s most prolific touts have been able to make huge sums of money by hoovering up tickets at fans’ expense and then capitalising on increased demand for the same events.

Shares in US-listed StubHub Holdings dropped 10% after reports emerged on Monday of the ban.

StubHub Holdings is the parent company of Viagogo, while the UK StubHub brand is a separate business, after a split forced by the UK consumer watchdog when Viagogo and StubHub announced a merger in 2020.

A spokesperson for StubHub International said the planned cap would condemn fans to take risks to see their favourite live events.

“With a price cap on regulated marketplaces, ticket transactions will move to black markets,” they said.

A Viagogo spokesman said: “Evidence shows price caps have repeatedly failed fans, in countries like Ireland and Australia fraud rates are nearly four times higher than in the UK as price caps push consumers towards unregulated sites.”

A government spokesperson declined to comment.

[www.theguardian.com]

Quote
SomeTorontoGirl
There is hope! Cruel, cruel hope!

Reselling tickets for profit to be outlawed in UK government crackdown

[www.theguardian.com]

I mentioned the article via BBC News on the ‘Overpriced concert tickets’ thread.
The BBC one has a readers’ comment section that has garnered more than 1,600 posts just in two days.

[www.bbc.co.uk]

To not take up so much space:

By the time many Blue Jays fans got through to the actual box office, tickets with a face value of $494 were going for at least $1,895 because they had already been purchased and were being offered up for resale. And that’s the absolute low end — there were tickets available for five times that price as well.

For a baseball game. One baseball game. One baseball playoff game. One of possibly four.


What was once touted as a way to help people get rid of seats to concerts and sporting events they couldn’t attend has become big business, with technologically adept scalpers employing banks of computers to gobble up hundreds of thousands of tickets and sell them for big profits.

Ticketmaster, which has faced public ire, class-action lawsuits and investigations by the Canadian Competition Bureau and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for facilitating the secondary resale market, now says it will put an end to this activity.

Not because it’s illegal or wrong. But because it’s causing “reputational harm.”

THAT is what concerns Ticketmaster NOW? That's beyond laughable. "Well, at least the entire house didn't burn down, the garage is still there."


“It doesn’t matter whether that’s lawful or unlawful. What started as a reasonable and acceptable level of behaviour 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,” stated the letter, which was obtained by several U.S. media outlets.

What started as a reasonable and acceptable level of... uh huh. The word "behaviour" is quite a shadowy way of saying "illegal".


According to media accounts, the letter says Ticketmaster will ban all users from having multiple accounts by forcing ticket resellers to divulge their Social Security numbers or Taxpayer ID numbers.

Certainly there are ways around that. But since so many people are Google geniuses, to put it mildly, Big Ticket will have loads of people not buying tickets at all because, well, Big Ticket.


“I think that Ticketmaster is concerned about the ongoing legal battles that have become both costly and a distraction,” said Richard Powers, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who studies sports marketing. Live Nation has claimed in the past that revenues from the resellers program is small, he added, “it just may no longer be worth the hassle.”

No longer worth the hassle. So it was worth the hassle but now that it's all been figured out, well, "sorry for being caught" is what Richard Powers meant to say.


For years, the issue of exorbitant ticket prices has continued to rear its head as fans, finding it nearly impossible to obtain tickets from the box office, instead resort to paying five or even 10 times more for resale tickets on StubHub or Ticketmaster.

Despite staging six shows in Toronto last fall, Taylor Swift was unable to get tickets straight into the hands of her fans, who had no choice but to pay up to $33,000 to see her live.

Uhhhh... it doesn't specifically say what the $33,000 is for since the preceding information involved the word "fans" but it's written to make one suspect the $33,000 is per ticket.

Either that's one hell of a typo or people really are that...


...The federal complaint alleged Ticketmaster facilitated the growth of the secondary ticket market by turning a blind eye to “brokers” who used multiple accounts and bots to harvest hundreds of thousands of tickets to concerts and sporting events. Ticketmaster then helped these brokers sell their tickets and profited when it got another fee on the second sale. This was not only a breach of federal law, the FTC complaint, which extensively cited the Star/CBC investigation, alleges, it ultimately cost consumers billions of dollars.

In response, Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice president and chief regulatory counsel, penned the letter, stating much of the FTC lawsuit is “plainly false.”

Really. That's kind of detailed. Go on!!!!

The FTC’s allegations provide “a distorted view of the facts and the law,” Wall wrote, claiming Ticketmaster has done “more than anyone else in the industry to fight the bad actors” that exploit the ticket resale market.

“Ticketmaster is an industry leader in the fight against bots and ticket scalping,” he wrote. “Among its many initiatives, Ticketmaster has invested more than $1 billion in ticketing technology, including anti-bot technology, fraud detection and ticket security. Invented rotating barcodes and digital ticketing to stop screenshot resale. Pioneered SafeTix and the smart queue digital waiting rooms to get tickets in the hands of real fans rather than bad actors. Developed powerful new technologies designed to prevent inauthentic account creation and provide for ongoing account validation.”

That's extremely detailed!!!!! Almost as if he's listing exactly what the federal complaint is about!!! Amazing he would know so much about it.

What's that saying? Thou doth...

"
Despite staging six shows in Toronto last fall, Taylor Swift was unable to get tickets straight into the hands of her fans, who had no choice but to pay up to $33,000 to see her live."

Kinda hard to take anything serious with this level of hyperbole.

We are talking about the most disposable of income for the most frivolous of activities. There is always a choice.

Also the fewer tickets on the secondary, the higher the prices are going to be. There are some Ariana Grande tickets with only a few hundred tickets available. Of course there is no incentive to lower prices on existing tickets.

And Wall is absolutely right with the level of security and technology. You only hear complaints about the absolute biggest tours where demand far outstrips supply. You aren't hearing this about the 95% of other tours.

To be honest I am happy to see the "scalpers got all the tickets" (when it's really just a few percent) crying change to "we're not going, period" crying.

Whole business will blow up, sooner than later.

Social media reach with capillary efficiency "fans" in every corner of the world, hype (i.e. demand) is created

Producers organize huge "events" to meet the demand.

In this context, when the market is no longer the local area but the whole world, even a huge stadium can be a "small venue"

Dynamic pricing enables producers to maximize fares

Most artists - of course - are not even close to be able to offer a show that meets the expectation created by social media / producers etc. so producers add all kind of extras to the show: fancy stages, screens, effects, etc. etc.

As a consequence, production costs lievitate. To amortize costs, the same set of extras - with minor customization - is used for multiple artists.

At the end of the day, people pay big money to see basically almost the same show, over and over.

The business is becoming more and more risky. In particular for the average bands.

The level of costs is so high, that you can just imagine what happens if the event fails. Of course, the weakest link of the chain - the artists - are those who are more at risk. If they generate the income, they are in, otherwise they are out.

The news of events that didn't sell out, venues that get filled up with free tickets and whoever are more and more common.

I'll go back to attend "pop" concerts when this whole crazy business is over.

C

I may have mentioned it, but the resale market is a separate, and lucrative, profit center for TM. They get triple service charges (original sale, resale and repurchase) and don’t refund the original purchase price to the reseller until the week after the event, so in most cases sit on that money earning interest for many months. This is why we can’t have nice things! Grumble (and so forth…)

Quote
SomeTorontoGirl
I may have mentioned it, but the resale market is a separate, and lucrative, profit center for TM. They get triple service charges (original sale, resale and repurchase) and don’t refund the original purchase price to the reseller until the week after the event, so in most cases sit on that money earning interest for many months. This is why we can’t have nice things! Grumble (and so forth…)

Ticketmaster has 11% market share in resale. The main impetus for buying Ticketsnow in 2008 was to get real time pricing data of what people are actually paying

Breaking: Live Nation Reaches Settlement With DOJ In Antitrust Case

J.R. Lind
03/09/2026

[news.pollstar.com]

--

Live Nation Settles Antitrust Suit With DOJ

The live-entertainment industry giant won’t be broken up, but will have to implement several changes, like capping service fees and opening its ticketing platform to rivals

By Jon Blistein
March 9, 2026

[www.rollingstone.com]

[archive.ph]

This decision will do NOTHING. What will soon come out is Rapino made a donation of gold toilets somewhere. The merger should have been unwound or a forced divestuture.

I've seen "backroom deal" mentioned.

"Nothing to see here" etc.

‘These People Are So Stupid’: Live Nation Employees Boast About High Fees in Unsealed Messages

Two regional directors of ticketing for Live Nation amphitheaters joked and bragged about “robbing [fans] blind” with sky-high parking prices

By Jon Blistein
March 12, 2026

[www.rollingstone.com]

[archive.ph]