Ticketmaster Has Been Accused Of Colluding With Scalpers
It's alleged the ticketing giant has been double-dipping on fees.
The North American arm of ticketing giant Ticketmaster has been accused of colluding with scalpers and collecting double fees on ticket transactions in a joint report by CBC and The Toronto Star.
The report alleges Ticketmaster is using its invite-only resell platform, TradeDesk, to enable scalpers to buy tickets in bulk (from the main Ticketmaster website), then sell them on at a marked up price. This means Ticketmaster could then collect double the fees on the tickets sold. Ticketmaster itself can raise or drop the prices of tickets in the back end of the TradeDesk site.
Ticketmaster is also accused of letting scalpers have multiple accounts, which means they can bypass the maximum ticket threshold.
“I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts,” a Ticketmaster representative told undercover reporters from CBC. “It’s not something that we look at or report.”
“I can’t think of any of my clients that aren’t using multiple accounts,” another rep said. “I mean, you’re not going to make a living off eight tickets.”
CBC alleges the ticketing service has brokers that are selling more than “millions of dollars worth of tickets”. A Ticketmaster representative reportedly told an undercover journalist that their biggest broker was selling “around 5 million” tickets per year.
Ticketmaster recruits professional scalpers who cheat its own system to expand its resale business and squeeze more money out of fans, a CBC News/Toronto Star investigation reveals. https://t.co/BvWdeQHGKW pic.twitter.com/3AurK3ZiCV
— CBC News (@CBCNews) September 19, 2018
In a response, Ticketmaster told CBC that they do not have “any control” over ticket pricing.
“Ticketmaster is a technology platform that helps artists and teams connect with their fans,” the company said in a statement to CBC. “We do not own the tickets sold on our platform nor do we have any control over ticket pricing — either in the initial sale or the resale.”
“In both cases, prices are set by the seller. We also do not determine when tickets are available for purchase or how they are allocated — those decisions are communicated to us by our client, the venue, after consultation with the event presenter.”
“As long as there is an imbalance between supply and demand in live event tickets, there will inevitably be a secondary market. As the world’s leading ticketing platform, representing thousands of teams, artists and venues, we believe it is our job to offer a marketplace that provides a safe and fair place for fans to shop, buy and sell tickets in both the primary and secondary markets.”
While it’s not clear whether Ticketmaster Australia has been implicated in the allegations, the service was recently slammed by fans after tickets sold out almost instantly for Childish Gambino’s show at the Sydney Opera House, only to reappear moments later on their resale site, Ticketmaster Resale.
Moreover, they were being listed for hundreds of dollars above the original purchase price of $111 — some of them were asking nearly $300 more. According to consumer rights organisation Choice, Ticketmaster takes about 21 per cent of each ticket sold through the Resale site.
Music Junkee has reached out to Ticketmaster for comment.