Ticketmaster issues statement on scalper-collusion accusations

In a statement issued Thursday morning, Ticketmaster denied accusations that it is essentially colluding with scalpers made in two bruising articles published by CBC and the Toronto Star this week. The outlets sent two undercover reporters to a live-entertainment conference in July, where representatives for Ticketmaster, which is owned by the live-entertainment giant Live Nation, pitched them on TradeDesk, the company’s invite-only proprietary platform for reselling tickets, and an employee was captured on camera saying that Ticketmaster’s “buyer abuse” team will look the other way when certain practices that the company publicly forbids take place on its own platforms.

The company also said it had already begun an internal review of its reseller accounts prior to the articles’ publication.

The statement follows below in full; read the full articles here and here.

“It is categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets at the expense of consumers. Ticketmaster’s Seller Code of Conduct specifically prohibits resellers from purchasing tickets that exceed the posted ticket limit for an event. In addition, our policy also prohibits the creation of fictitious user accounts for the purpose of circumventing ticket limit detection in order to amass tickets intended for resale.

“A recent CBC story found that an employee of Ticketmaster’s resale division acknowledged being aware of some resellers having as many as 200 TradeDesk accounts for this purpose (TradeDesk is Ticketmaster’s professional reseller product that allows resellers to validate and distribute tickets to multiple marketplaces). We do not condone the statements made by the employee as the conduct described clearly violates our terms of service.

“The company had already begun an internal review of our professional reseller accounts and employee practices to ensure that our policies are being upheld by all stakeholders. Moving forward we will be putting additional measures in place to proactively monitor for this type of inappropriate activity.”