Ticketmaster Claims in Letter to Congress That It ‘Does More Than Anyone to Get Tickets Into the Hands of Real Fans’; NIVA and NITO Do Not Agree

In response to a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit, Ticketmaster has introduced a suite of new rules designed to combat ticket scalping. A letter from the company's Executive Vice President, Dan Wall, details measures that include preventing the creation of duplicate accounts, mandating that resellers verify their identity using a taxpayer ID, and deploying artificial intelligence for faster detection and cancellation of tickets bought by automated bots.

Dan Wall, a senior executive at Live Nation Entertainment—the parent company of Ticketmaster and a dominant force in the global live events industry—forcefully argued the company's case. He asserted that "Ticketmaster does more than anyone to fight bots and get tickets into the hands of real fans," highlighting a strategy to use Social Security numbers or taxpayer IDs to identify and deactivate scalper accounts. Wall also committed to enforcing the platform's resale rules for brokers and confirmed the discontinuation of TradeDesk, a software tool used by resellers to manage large volumes of tickets, which Live Nation denies was ever used to mislead consumers.

Live Nation has formally denied the lawsuit's core claims, which accuse it of colluding with resellers to inflate prices and violating the 2016 Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act. This legislation was specifically enacted to prohibit the use of automated software that circumvents purchase limits, a practice that facilitates the resale of tickets at massively inflated prices. The ongoing difficulty of enforcement was noted by an industry analyst, who stated, "The BOTS Act provided a crucial legal framework, but its effectiveness has always hinged on proactive and transparent enforcement by the primary ticketing platforms themselves."

The reaction from independent music groups was immediate and critical. The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA)—a coalition celebrated for its pivotal role in securing the Save Our Stages Act, a multi-billion-dollar pandemic relief fund for shuttered venues—dismissed the new policies as "too little and too late to get back the trust of fans, artists, and stages." They charged that Ticketmaster is attempting to repair a "devastated public image" after being "caught opening up their systems to predatory resellers," and argued that a true fix would involve Live Nation capping resale prices on its platform at the original face value.

Echoing these sentiments, the National Independent Talent Organization (NITA), which advocates for independent managers and booking agents, reiterated that no ticketing service should allow tickets to be resold above their initial price, a practice they say harms the artist-fan relationship. Despite their criticism, they conceded that the FTC's legal action seems to have finally prompted Ticketmaster to take tangible steps, such as terminating broker accounts and strengthening bot enforcement. With regulatory pressure mounting and public frustration at a peak, further evolution within the ticketing industry is widely expected.