Live Nation has formally denied the US Federal Trade Commission‘s claims that Ticketmaster profited from ticket brokers who got around artists’ ticket limits.
In a filing made on Tuesday (October 13) in federal court in Los Angeles, the company and its ticketing arm called the lawsuit “misguided.”
They also accused the FTC of trying to “flip the Act on its head” by using the BOTS Act, a 2016 law aimed at ticket scalpers, against them.
The filing is the companies’ answer to the FTC‘s lawsuit, responding to each of the complaint’s allegations and setting out their defenses.
The 37-page filing can be read in full here.
The FTC and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster in September 2025.
The states are Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia.
Their complaint alleges that Ticketmaster knowingly let brokers use hundreds or thousands of accounts to buy more tickets than artists’ limits allowed, then resold those tickets on its own resale marketplace.
The complaint says this let the companies “‘triple dip’ on fees,” charging brokers when they bought the tickets, charging them again when the tickets were resold, and charging fans who bought them on Ticketmaster‘s resale market.
It cites an internal email in which a senior Ticketmaster executive allegedly said the companies “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers exceeding posted ticket limits.
Separately, the FTC alleges that Ticketmaster misled fans by advertising ticket prices that left out mandatory fees until checkout, and by misrepresenting how strictly it enforced ticket limits.
The FTC is seeking civil penalties, other monetary relief, and a court order barring the practices it describes.
The complaint does not put a figure on the penalties or relief it seeks, but alleges that consumers paid more than USD $16.4 billion in mandatory fees on Ticketmaster purchases between 2019 and 2024.
It puts Ticketmaster‘s fees on resale tickets over the same period at USD $3.7 billion.
If the FTC wins, ticketing companies that run their own resale marketplaces could be held liable for reselling tickets they knew, or should have known, brokers had obtained by getting around the measures used to enforce ticket limits.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster asked the court to throw out the case on January 6, calling it “an egregious instance of agency overreach.”
US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong rejected that request on September 28.
“The BOTS Act does not preclude platforms from facing liability, and the Court will not read it as doing so,” she wrote.
Earlier in the order, she noted that the court was “not deciding at this stage whether the FTC‘s and the states’ accusations are true.”
In their new filing, Live Nation and Ticketmaster deny every factual allegation in the complaint that they do not specifically admit.
“Ticketmaster, and its parent company, Live Nation, have been at the forefront of the fight against ticket scalpers, investing over $1 billion since 2010 to prevent scalpers’ industrial-scale, technology-driven ticket purchasing and to protect fans’ access to primary ticket sales,” the filing states.
“Ticketmaster, and its parent company, Live Nation, have been at the forefront of the fight against ticket scalpers, investing over $1 billion since 2010 to prevent scalpers’ industrial-scale, technology-driven ticket purchasing and to protect fans’ access to primary ticket sales.”
Live Nation and Ticketmaster
“Now, through improper enforcement of the Better Online Ticket Sales Act… Plaintiffs seek to punish Live Nation and Ticketmaster for not perfectly blocking all ticket purchase abuse on Ticketmaster’s platform. Plaintiffs’ lawsuit is misguided.
“Congress passed the Act to combat scalpers who use bots and other technological exploits to circumvent ticket issuers’ safeguards and harvest tickets ahead of fans, not to penalize ticket companies like Defendants that invest substantial resources to implement safeguards against scalpers, by targeting limitations in their safeguards. The BOTS Act is intended to bolster Defendants’ fight against scalpers, not undercut it.”
“Now, inexplicably, the Commission seeks to flip the Act on its head by turning it against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the very companies the Act is intended to support,” the companies argue. “This perversion of the Act contradicts its plain meaning, flouts the will of Congress, and undoubtedly sets back the fight against scalpers.”
The companies warn that the FTC‘s approach “risks a severe chilling effect on abuse prevention.”
Because the BOTS Act only covers getting around the measures a ticket issuer uses to enforce its ticket limits, the companies say, a platform with no limits or anti-bot tools would face no exposure under it.
“Under the Commission’s reading, by contrast, any new abuse-prevention measure or ticket limit Ticketmaster deploys becomes a new source of potential liability whenever a determined scalper finds a way around it,” the companies contend. “Platforms will face pressure to abandon prevention measures or purchase limits altogether, making it exponentially easier for scalpers to harvest tickets, forcing fans, artists, and venues to bear the cost.
“Alternatively, faced with existential, compound penalties for third-party conduct they neither committed nor controlled, ticket resale platforms would be compelled to reduce or abandon resale services, limiting fan choice and depriving fans of resale fraud protections. Congress surely did not intend such a perverse result.”
“Despite the narrative Plaintiffs attempt to push, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been committed to protecting fans’ access to tickets; nearly every major technological advancement in the fight against bots and automated ticket harvesting has come from Defendants,” the filing claims. “And Defendants continue to invest in this fight.
“In 2025, Ticketmaster detected and blocked nearly 260 million attempts daily by bots to access its services, and currently blocks tens of thousands of suspected inauthentic account-creation attempts each day. It has built and continues to refine layered defenses against bots and purchase abuse – including CAPTCHA challenges, account authentication, analytics that detect accounts under common control, and the cancellation of inauthentic accounts – and it has pursued legal action against bot operators and scalpers.”
“Despite the narrative Plaintiffs attempt to push, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been committed to protecting fans’ access to tickets; nearly every major technological advancement in the fight against bots and automated ticket harvesting has come from Defendants.”
Live Nation and Ticketmaster
Live Nation made a similar claim in October 2025, when Dan Wall, its EVP for Corporate and Regulatory Affairs, told two US senators that it had spent more than USD $1 billion on bot prevention.
On the FTC‘s deception claims, the filing says Ticketmaster has changed how it displays prices.
“Finally, Plaintiffs’ claims that Defendants engaged in unfair or deceptive acts with respect to Ticketmaster’s presentation of fees and ticket limit disclosures also lack merit,” the filing states. “Ticketmaster now employs all-in pricing consistent with the Commission’s rules, and Defendants deny that they engaged in any false or misleading conduct as to disclosures on ticket limits.”
The filing does admit that Ticketmaster is “the largest primary ticketing services company in the United States.”
It also admits that when a ticket is resold on Ticketmaster, “the original ticket is voided and a new ticket is issued to the purchaser.”
In her ruling, Judge Frimpong cited the complaint’s description of that process as an additional ground for finding that the FTC had adequately alleged that Ticketmaster itself sells resale tickets.
Among 16 affirmative defenses listed in the filing, the companies argue that the BOTS Act is unconstitutionally vague as applied to their alleged conduct and that the FTC never gave fair notice that the alleged conduct was unlawful.
Citing the major questions doctrine, they argue that the FTC is overstepping its authority by applying the law to ticket resale platforms without clear approval from Congress.
And they claim the plaintiffs are violating the Equal Protection Clause by “selectively, arbitrarily, and unequally enforcing the BOTS Act and the FTC Act against Defendants.”
In its second-quarter filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Live Nation told investors that “we do not believe that a loss is probable of occurring at this time” in the FTC case, as MBW reported.
The FTC case is separate from the antitrust case in which a federal jury in Manhattan found in April that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had illegally monopolized primary ticketing at major US concert venues.
That verdict was a win for 33 states and the District of Columbia, which pressed on with the case after the US Department of Justice settled its claims a week into the trial in March. The companies have since asked the court to throw out that verdict or order a new trial.Music Business Worldwide
