Schneiderman released the results of an investigation into consumer abuses in the live entertainment ticket industry on Thursday.
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In a statement, Ticketmaster said: “Ticketmaster fully cooperated with the Attorney General’s office in developing the report and looks forward to continuing to work with the Attorney General to ensure that artists can get tickets into the hands of their fans”.
Due to ticket brokers using illegal bots and other methods, the state report said the average ticket price sells for almost 50 percent more than face value.
In 2014, for instance, a single broker, using a single bot, nabbed 1,012 tickets within a minute of a U2 show at MSG going onsale, and eventually gobbled up more than 15,000 U2 tickets nationwide.
Also on Thursday, Schneiderman’s office announced settlements with brokers MSMSS, LLC and Extra Base Tickets, LLC that were illegally operating without a ticket reseller license.
The report flagged sites such as MyCityRocks and Ticketmaster claiming they regularly tack on fees, which are sometimes more than the face value price of the ticket.
And most tickets to major events are never even offered to the general public in the first place, according to Schneiderman’s report.
Yet the AG’s office “found an average surcharge of 21% of the face value of a ticket, which amounts to nearly $8 in fees on average”. It’s possible that the league simply doesn’t want fans to get accustomed to the availability of tickets at prices below the prices applied to them by the teams. Because of this, many New Yorkers are forced to pay much more for some concerts and sporting events. “Ticketing, to put it bluntly, is a fixed game”, the report read. But teams also discourage fans from selling elsewhere, and at least one team has threatened to strip season ticket holders of their seats if they sell through other sites, according to the Denver Post.
“It is therefore easy for buyers to be fooled into believing what they are paying is the market price for a ticket”, Schneiderman’s report says.
Bots are purchasing concert tickets in NY at an extremely high rate, but the practice is illegal.
Vendors can acquire large numbers tickets quickly by using multiple IP addresses and special software called Ticket Bots.
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Bruce Springsteen’s next show, which will be at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ, is now sold out on TicketMaster (tickets were priced between $68 and $150). He’s looking to go after these electronic ticket buyers – but, so far, the brokers behind the bots have proven elusive.
