Live Nation and Ticketmaster Request Dismissal in FTC Lawsuit: ‘Egregious Instance of Agency Overreach’

Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, have requested the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, slamming the suit as an “egregious instance of agency overreach.”

In a motion filed in a California court Tuesday, the two companies urged a federal judge to throw out the case — which claimed they worked with resellers to raise prices on resale tickets and, in turn, violated the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016 — arguing that the suit’s “primary allegation” was inaccurately attributed.

“This statute is designed to help ticket issuers like Ticketmaster combat ticket harvesting and scalping, ensuring that tickets are accessible to genuine fans,” lawyers representing the companies wrote in Tuesday’s motion. “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.”

The motion added: “Ultimately, Plaintiffs’ theory boils down to the idea that Ticketmaster is liable under the BOTS Act merely for knowing that some brokers used multiple accounts or that some accounts possessed more tickets than the ticket limit permitted. But that theory does not amount to a violation of the statute Congress enacted. Plaintiffs cannot rewrite that statute through this litigation.”

A hearing for this motion has been scheduled for Feb. 19.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation were sued by the FTC and seven states back in September, in which the event ticket seller was accused of deceptive pricing and colluding with scalpers to keep ticket prices artificially high.

“In public, defendants profess to prioritize ‘[g]etting tickets into the hands of fans, at prices set by the artist,’” the 84-page lawsuit stated at the time. “Defendants also claim that ticket scalpers and ‘big resale sites’ are to blame for the resale tickets that defendants sell for substantially more than the face value of the ticket. In private, however, defendants have tacitly worked with those very same scalpers, allowing them to unlawfully purchase millions of dollars in tickets in the primary market, so that defendants can extract more profit for themselves when reselling those tickets on the secondary market.”

Following the suit, Ticketmaster banned users with multiple accounts in a bid to stop scalpers. However, Live Nation’s EVP of corporate and regulatory affairs Dan Wall refuted the claim that Ticketmaster worked with scalpers, highlighting in a letter to shareholders the many ways Ticketmaster had combatted scalping.

“Ticketmaster is an industry leader in the fight against bots and ticket scalping,” he said at the time. “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.”

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