The US authorities announced Thursday to process the mastodon of the box office online and his mother -in -nation house, accused of “illegal curriculum tactics.”
The consumer protection agency (FTC) and seven US states criticize these companies for allowing resellers to buy substantial amounts of tickets, in violation of the purchase limits and then resell them at much higher prices.
Tickets that cost “eyes of the head”
The entertainment “must be accessible to everyone. Bring your family to watch a baseball should not cost your head,” said Andrew Ferguson, president of the FTC, cited in a statement.
He mentions the decree signed in March by the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to protect consumers from abuse in ticket prices.
The FTC accuses Ticketmaster, which controls about 80% of the sale of large concert halls in the United States, having “closed the eyes” to the resellers who regularly exceeded the limits of the tickets through the use of thousands of false accounts.
The agency said internal documents show that Ticketmaster has even provided technological support to these intermediaries, through a platform called Tradedesk, to facilitate the resale of tickets.
Ticketmaster Price Practices in question
The complaint is also aimed at ticketmaster price practices. According to the FTC, the company announces significantly lower prices than the final cost of tickets, after adding additional costs.
These “hidden” costs, which can reach up to 44% of the price of a ticket, represented $ 16.4 billion between 2019 and 2024, according to the FTC.
In May 2024, the US Ministry of Justice assigned Live Nation before a Federal Court for anti -comppetitive practices.
The Biden government said it wanted to cause a division between Live Nation and its Ticketmaster box office.
Ticketmaster was remarkably criticized for his management of the sale of places on the tour of the American singer Taylor Swift, in November 2022.
Overwhelmed by applications, the operator had seen the dysfunction of his site, without success in filtering the “bots”, these software that allowed to buy tickets in large quantities, to resell them thereafter.
The case had given rise to the public criticism of Taylor Swift, but above all to a hearing before the United States Senate Judicial Affairs Committee, during which one of the group’s officials had been strongly sermon.
Source: BFM TV
