NY attorney general probes concert, sports ticket sales

Announcing he “regularly receives complaints from New Yorkers frustrated by their inability to purchase tickets to concerts”, Eric Schneiderman, the state’s attorney general, launched a scathing report Thursday, ripping the ticket-resale business as a “fixed game”.

The investigation showed some brokers also use illegal “ticket bot” software to gobble up tickets when they go on sale to resell at a significant markup.

Schneiderman also wants to force sites like StubHub to disclose the original face value of the ticket – a rule he said is already required by NY law. Shows including Coldplay & Jay-Z, Jay Z & Justin Timberlake, and Fleetwood Mac reserved more than 50 percent of tickets for presale events, with none explicitly earmarked for fan clubs, the report found.

“It took a single bot just one minute to buy more than 1,000 tickets to a U2 concert”, he said.

Schneiderman says his office has reached settlements with two ticket brokers operating without a reseller license.

The NFL Ticket Exchange prohibits a seller from setting a price below a certain level, often the face value of the ticket, Schneiderman said in a report released Thursday.

Problems in the ticket industry extend beyond sports to popular concerts and theater productions, the attorney general’s office report said. “Brokers then mark up the price of those tickets – by an estimated 49% on average, but sometimes by more than 1,000% – yielding easy profits”. Tickets, he said, should be limited to a percentage over the face-value cost of a particular ticket.

In the StubHub era, Adele’s team recently battled scalpers by going through lists of ticket sales and refunding purchases that appeared to be from resellers; AC/DC, Tom Waits and Metallica are among the artists who’ve switched to a “paperless” system requiring buyers to show credit cards and ID to get into shows.

“I’ve been to numerous concerts in my life, but recently I’ve had more difficulty purchasing tickets”, said Debra Cresanti of the Town of Cheektowaga.

Many NFL teams encourage or even require ticket holders to use Ticketmaster’s NFL Ticket Exchange platform, where the seller is prohibited from cutting the price. The main exceptions are the sites that sell movie tickets, because those vendors charge consumer fees that are close in magnitude to the average fees charged in live event ticketing. Consumers should be protected from unfair and deceptive practices that make it harder for fans to buy and use event tickets in an open market.

The practice also harms consumers, according to Schneiderman., who said the price floor established by the NFL Ticket Exchange can fool buyers into thinking they are paying market prices.