A senior Ticketmaster executive wrote that the company would turn a “blind eye” to ticket brokers breaking its rules “as a matter of policy.” That email is now Exhibit A in a federal case, and on Monday a judge said the case can go ahead.
Here’s the setup. The FTC and seven states sued Ticketmaster and Live Nation last September, saying the company let professional resellers dodge its own purchase limits. An internal review allegedly found that just five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts holding 246,407 tickets across 2,594 events. Every time one of those tickets got flipped, Ticketmaster collected another round of fees. You can see why nobody in the building was in a hurry to stop it.
Ticketmaster’s defense was that the law against ticket-buying bots only covers the resellers, not the platform. Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong wasn’t buying that. She wrote that the law “does not preclude platforms from facing liability,” and she let the FTC’s complaint about hidden fees stand too. Ticketmaster now shows all-in prices, which is nice, about a decade late.
To be fair, a judge refusing to toss a case isn’t a verdict. Nothing has been proven, and Ticketmaster calls the lawsuit “misguided” and says it will fail. Innocent until proven guilty applies to companies too, even the ones we all love to hate.
But I want to be clear about what kind of case this is, because it’s the kind I like. Nobody is asking for a brand-new law or a splashy hearing where a senator yells at a CEO for the cameras. The rule already exists. The question is whether the company that runs the marketplace has to follow it, or whether enforcement is optional when the fees are good. Regulation that actually goes after a real problem with real evidence is fine by me. It’s the press-release kind that makes my eye twitch.
And think about the incentives. Ticketmaster didn’t just fail to stop scalpers, according to the complaint, it got paid when they won. When the referee takes a cut of every bet, you don’t get a fair game. You get a very expensive night out that somehow still ends with you watching a concert on someone’s phone screen from row 40.
I’ve never had much sympathy for the idea that a company can be huge and protected from competition at the same time. Big is fine. Earning your size is fine. Collecting fees from a problem you could fix and chose not to is something else.
So here’s my two cents: if the email means what it says, the fine should cost more than the fees those 246,407 tickets brought in, because otherwise it’s just the price of doing business.