Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says his office has also reached settlements with two ticket brokers operating without a reseller license.
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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said ticketing is a fixed game. “On average, NY venues and their ticketing vendors charge fees averaging 21% of face values, which exceeds what other online sellers charge”.
According to the report released Thursday, an average of only about 46 percent of tickets to top-grossing shows are available to the public because blocks are reserved for preferred buyers, like customers of a sponsoring company.
“This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry”, Schneiderman said of his findings. That, Schneiderman said, is due to illegal brokers and ticket bots.
The source familiar with the National Football League antitrust probe, who asked not to be identified because of the non-public nature of the matter, said it was spurred by a flood of complaints about use of the illegal software known as ticket bots.
Numerous brokers illegally reselling large numbers of tickets were unlicensed, according to the report.
The report claims that one automated buyer managed to snag 1,000 tickets to a U2 concert at MSG in less than a minute. 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.
An NFL spokesman said the NFL Ticket Exchange is just one of many options for ticket holders to buy or sell tickets. A “young software developer”, working with a broker that made $42 million in 2013 selling $31 million in tickets on StubHub, used an optical-character-recognition program to purchase hundreds of thousands of tickets.
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images Schneiderman found that the Yankees also set floor prices for the re-sale of tickets, but it’s unclear if the team is also under investigation.
In what appears to be a separate probe, CNBC said in a tweet that the attorney general’s office is conducting an antitrust investigation of National Football League and its price-floor practices on tickets. 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.
“The revelation that the concert and sport ticket industry is unfair is nothing new, however discovering how deep it goes is certainly unsettling”, said Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz (D-Bronx), chair of the Assembly Committee on Consumer Affairs & Protection.
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Even before the tickets went on sale in December, StubHub and similar sites advertised tickets ranging up to $5,000, a method that is known as speculative ticket listing, where scalpers offer up seats they don’t actually possess yet.
