Ticketmaster just got busted for something that may just infuriate the music community at large. Toronto publication CBC sent an undercover reporter to an exclusive panel in which media was not invited…we assume this was the red flag that made them curious enough to enter.
In the summit, entitled “We appreciate your partnership: More brokers are listing with Ticketmaster than ever before,” the publication discovered that Ticketmaster values some scalpers’ business as if they were employees themselves. In learning the ugly details behind their practices and hearings first-hand accounts from those who have been a part of this from the start, they immediately revealed this shady practice in a revealing story. The only silver lining to all of this is that several people buying these tickets didn’t have to worry about the tickets being fake…but we imagine some serious outrage and potential legal troubles are to come for Ticketmaster soon.
In July, the news outlets sent a pair of reporters undercover to Ticket Summit 2018, a ticketing and live entertainment convention at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Posing as scalpers and equipped with hidden cameras, the journalists were pitched on Ticketmaster’s professional reseller program.
Company representatives told them Ticketmaster’s resale division turns a blind eye to scalpers who use ticket-buying bots and fake identities to snatch up tickets and then resell them on the site for inflated prices. Those pricey resale tickets include extra fees for Ticketmaster.
“I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred accounts,” one sales representative said. “It’s not something that we look at or report.”
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