Inquiry finds many concert tickets are held for insiders

“In a statement, Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation Entertainment, said that it cooperated with the investigation and that the company supported the attorney general’s efforts to manage bots and the elimination of the paperless ticketing ban”.

“Some ticket issuers – particularly sports teams, including National Football League teams and the New York Yankees – have put in place price floors [which] are rules created to prevent tickets from being sold at a price below some level, usually the face value of the ticket or something close to it”, Schneiderman’s 44-page report states.

“The industry must provide greater transparency into the allocation of tickets, to increase accountability and enable the public to make informed choices”, Schneiderman wrote.

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

The report drew attention to the increasing imposition of resale price floors, which fixes the bottom line for ticket prices. The way this partnership plays out is that the National Football League urges fans to only use Ticketmaster when re-selling unwanted tickets.

Brokers used software known as ticket bots to automate the purchase of large quantities of tickets and later resold the tickets with markups that sometimes exceeded 1,000%. It also said the platforms should make it easier for vendors to disclose the face value of the tickets they sell.

Some 1,012 tickets for U2 at Madison Square Garden in 2015 were gobbled in one minute.

The report made a number of recommendations, including asking concert promoters to be more transparent about how tickets are released to the public and encouraging secondary ticket markets to police their systems more thoroughly.

“The NFL does not require them to use the Ticket Exchange”, NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told the Associated Press. Once they scoop up tickets, they resell them for high prices on third-party sites.

The floor pricing issue was part of a larger report Schneiderman released Thursday following a multi-year investigation into the ticket industry. Fans desperately scouring the web for tickets in the minutes, hours, and days after the concert sold out were confronted with astronomically inflated resale prices. M.S.M.S.S. of Manhattan received $80,000 in penalties, and Extra Base Tickets, of Garden City, New York, handed over $65,000. Meanwhile, the New York Yankees have battled endlessly with online ticket resellers … not to protect the consumer, but the organization’s bottom line: Generally speaking, you can buy Yankees tickets on StubHub for less money than they’ll run you at the box office.