I hope something comes from this, though Ticketmaster is basically the Deadpool of legal actions. But this is very slimy, especially when you think about how it rips off not just fans but the artists, who are shut out from the secondary market prices that are essentially, thanks to Ticketmaster's collusion with scalpers revealed in this piece, the primary market prices.

https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/09/19/we-went-undercover-as-ticket-scalpers-and-ticketmaster-offered-to-help-us-do-business.html


Inside a Caesars Palace conference room filled with some of the world’s most successful ticket scalpers, a row of promotional booths pitch software programs that help harvest thousands of sport and concert seats to be resold online at hefty markups.

...

As gatekeeper to the entertainment industry’s most coveted events, Ticketmaster implements strict purchasing limits designed to prevent scalpers from using bots to buy tickets on a mass scale. In the past, company officials have publicly disparaged the resale ticket market, calling scalpers “pirates” and a threat to fans — even urging governments to criminalize the activity.

But in one corner of the Las Vegas convention floor sat a conspicuous Ticketmaster booth welcoming scalpers with a solemn reassurance: Ticketmaster wants to share in the profits of the resale market by facilitating the mass scalping of its tickets — in direct violation of its own terms of use.


...

Reporters from the Star and CBC, posing as small-time scalpers from Canada, listened as sales staff pitched a proprietary Ticketmaster software program designed to help bulk buyers resell thousands of tickets.

“I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred Ticketmaster accounts,” said a sales executive with Ticketmaster Resale speaking to the undercover reporters.

The web-based tool — called Trade Desk — allows scalpers to seamlessly sync their Ticketmaster accounts (where they buy their tickets) with their online resale operation, quickly posting each seat to ticket reselling websites including StubHub, Vivid Seats and ticketmaster.com.

It also gives Ticketmaster a new revenue source: a second commission on every “verified resale” ticket sold on Ticketmaster.com (on top of the commission it collects on the original purchase of each ticket).