Arts & Entertainment
Illinois AG Joins Lawsuit Accusing Ticketmaster of Illegal Ticket Resale Tactics
FILE - An advertisement for Ticketmaster is viewed along an area reserved for special guests on the sideline of the field before an NFL football game, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, file)
Illinois has joined the Federal Trade Commission and a half dozen other states in filing a lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its parent company alleging they’ve engaged in deceptive and illegal business practices that leave buyers paying more for show tickets.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul on Thursday announced the lawsuit, which claims Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation have worked with scalpers to inflate ticket prices on the secondary market, costing fans millions of dollars every year.
“Ticketmaster’s deceptive business tactics have left fans paying steep hidden fees and pushed them into expensive, secondary ticket markets,” Raoul said in a statement. “While Ticketmaster claims to limit bulk purchases by brokers, it allows its own rules on purchase limits to be broken. The company then profits when those tickets sell for higher prices — and Ticketmaster can collect another round of fees — in its own resale marketplace.”
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, seeks civil penalties against Ticketmaster and potential monetary relief.
According to that suit, Ticketmaster claims to prioritize getting “tickets into the hands of fans, at prices set by the artist,” while also putting blame on ticket brokers for reselling tickets at substantially higher costs.
In reality, the lawsuit claims, the companies have “tacitly worked” with those same brokers by allowing them to illegally purchase millions of dollars’ worth of tickets at face value so that Ticketmaster can then “extract more profit for themselves” when those tickets are resold on the secondary market.
According to the lawsuit, this “illegal conduct” frustrates artists and their desire to maintain affordable ticket prices that fit the needs of ordinary families.
“American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us. It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show,” FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said in a statement.
The lawsuit claims that even when buyers are able to purchase tickets directly from Ticketmaster — rather than the secondary market — they encountered mandatory fees that increased the cost by up to 30%.
Fans have few alternatives for buying tickets, according to Raoul’s office, as Live Nation controls approximately 80% of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market.
According to Raoul, consumers spent more than $82.6 billion purchasing tickets from Ticketmaster between 2019 and 2024.
“In public, Defendants maintain that their business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits,” the lawsuit states. “In private, Defendants acknowledge that their 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.”
