Ticketmaster has hit back at allegations this week that it has colluded with scalpers in an attempt to "boost its profits at the expense of music fans”.
Following an in-depth investigation by CBC News and Toronto Star, it was alleged that the global ticketing giant increased ticket prices for a Bruno Mars concert in the hours and days after they went on sale depending on how popular they were and they’ve also been accused of not putting all tickets on sale initially.
Instead, the company was allegedly found to have released cheaper tickets slowly in order to sell those at a higher price point first.
In a statement given to The Music today, Ticketmaster denied the allegations.
“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," the statement reads.
"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.”
It comes after revered Australian promoter Michael Chugg expressed his distaste at Ticketmaster's resale facility during a recent interview with The Music.
“Sometimes we suspect tickets are going up before they're even being sold on the right site, you know? I've even done it myself where I've googled up Ticketmaster and I haven't gone to the right box office I've gone to the resale box office," he said.
“And then you go onto Ticketmaster and they've got tickets for the other cities which are Ticketek tickets - well how did they get them?”
