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Ticketmaster reaches settlement with FTC over Springsteen ticket resale debacle

By | Published on Thursday 18 February 2010

In related news, Ticketmaster has reportedly agreed to refund money to fans who bought tickets for one of two Bruce Springsteen concerts in New Jersey last year at hiked up rates via the firm’s US-based secondary ticketing website TicketsNow.

As much previously reported, The Boss lashed out at Ticketmaster when he learned that the ticketing giant – the official ticket agents for his gigs – had been pointing his fans to the resale of tickets for his shows on TicketsNow before Ticketmaster had actually sold out of tickets itself. Fans who followed the link to TicketsNow would, of course, end up buying tickets for the gig at a marked up price.

The incident was partly caused by Ticketmaster’s policy of promoting its ticket re-sale website via its primary ticketing service, and partly by a glitch in the ticketing giant’s system which made it appear the two New Jersey shows were sold out when they weren’t. Springsteen and others accused Ticketmaster of ripping off the singer’s fans, noting that the ticketing firm earned two commissions if tickets were sold on their own website, and then resold on TicketsNow.

A whole load of outrage followed, with both state and federal authorities getting involved. A deal was done quite quickly with New Jersey regulators, but the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into the whole thing has been ongoing ever since. It is thought the FTC will close that investigation today by announcing that Ticketmaster has agreed to give any fan who bought a ticket for one of the Springsteen gigs in New Jersey via TicketsNow a refund. Said fans will have any mark up they paid refunded, ie the price they paid for the ticket minus its face value. It’s thought about 800 fans are due a refund, and its pledge to pay those refunds could cost Ticketmaster hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The settlement with the FTC is also likely to include new rules regarding the resale of tickets on TicketsNow and any linking between the main Ticketmaster site and the resale site, though said linking has stopped anyway, partly as a result of the ticketing firm’s aforementioned deal with New Jersey officials. It’s also thought that the FTC’s report on the Springsteen debacle will result in some new rules for the US secondary ticketing market at large, ie it will have an impact on TicketNow’s rivals too.

Ticketmaster, of course, is now a division of Live Nation Entertainment following the merger of the ticketing firm with the tour promoter and venue owner. Although said merger is now being re-reviewed by UK competition regulators after its original OK for the deal was successfully appealed by one of Ticketmaster’s rivals, the combined Live Nation Entertainment is already operational. According to the company’s new email signature line the combined LNE is “the world’s first artist-to-fan vertically integrated live entertainment platform”, which is great news, I’ve always been a big fan of live entertainment platforms that are vertically integrated when it comes to the artist-to-fan relationship. 



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