BOTS Act Applies To Ticketmaster, Judge Rules, Allowing Prosecution To Continue

The Federal Trade Commission’s prosecution of Live Nation and Ticketmaster for violation of the BOTS Act can move forward, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of the Central District of California denied Ticketmaster’s motion to dismiss which argued that the BOTS Act was aimed at individual resellers rather than platforms themselves.

“The BOTS Act does not preclude platforms from facing liability, and the court will not read it as doing so,” Frimpong wrote. The case now moves to discovery.

“Live Nation and Ticketmaster could have implemented measures to curtail continuing violations of ticket purchase limits,” Frimpong wrote. “However, the FTC maintains that Live Nation and Ticketmaster ‘have reduced, discontinued, or declined to implement the use of tools that could effectively enforce ticket limits against brokers,’ thereby enabling circumvention.”

The suit — filed in September 2026 and joined by the attorneys-general of Virginia, Utah, Florida, Tennessee, Nebraska, Illinois and Colorado — claims that Ticketmaster and Live Nation “tacitly worked” with secondary sellers, allowing them to buy tickets in the thousands and then list them for resale at marked-up prices, often on Ticketmaster’s own platform, thus giving Ticketmaster multiple bites at the revenue apple: from the initial purchase, the listing by the secondary seller and the consumer who ultimately buys the resold ticket.

The FTC says an unnamed senior Ticketmaster executive wrote in an internal email that the companies “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers’ violations of posted ticket limits and that five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed 246,407 concert tickets to 2,594 events.

The suit says that Ticketmaster’s TradeDesk software gives the company the ability to determine which brokers are violating purchase limits, but armed with that information, does nothing to stop it.

“The companies also have consistently declined to deploy additional technology that would more effectively prevent brokers from evading ticket limits because such tactics would decrease their revenue, according to internal company documents,” the FTC said in a statement. “For example, the company in 2021 opted against using third-party identity verification because it was ‘too effective.’”

The suit says Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s “illegal conduct frustrates artists’ desire to maintain affordable ticket prices that fit the needs of ordinary American families, costing ordinary fans millions of dollars every year.”

The lawsuit further alleges bait and switch by Ticketmaster by advertising list prices that didn’t include mandatory fees. Ticketmaster voluntarily switched to all-in upfront pricing in June 2023 for tickets at Live Nation venues ahead of an FTC rule change made in the waning days of the Biden Administration that mandated all-in pricing across the ticketing industry.

The suit also alleges BOTS Act violations, saying that Ticketmaster is complicit in the use of automated bots and deceptive practices by secondary sellers on its site. That echoes a defense by Key Investment Group — a conglomerate that controls numerous resale sites that is also being sued for BOTS Act violation — who said, in short, that it cannot violate the BOTS Act because Ticketmaster is aware of the “common” tactics used by secondary sellers.

“American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. “It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show.”

The suit asks a judge to permanenly enjoin Ticketmaster and Live Nation from violations of the FTC Act, the BOTS Act and the consumer protection laws of the plaintiff states, as well as undetermined monetary relief and fines for BOTS Act violations.