Photo Credit: Claudio Schwarz
In live music, ticket resale remains a lucrative market shaped by secondary market ticket brokers and the platforms that enable them. These brokers use many of the automated tools that Digital Music News highlighted in our second article on how these ticket resellers operate. But the real harm comes when they deploy speculative tactics that create a volatile marketplace where fans are often the only losers.
Missed our first two articles in this series? Start here:
The problem is that speculative ticketing has become a cornerstone of this system. Brokers list thousands of seats on platforms like StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid Seats before they even have the tickets in hand.
Known as ‘prelisting’ among the reseller community, this practice allows brokers to immediately profit from demand spikes—whether driven by viral artist moments, tour expansions, or global news events. Pricing can swing wildly in the day-to-day, where a surprise festival slot or negative press could send resell values skyrocketing or crashing overnight.
Secondary markets often brand these brokers as ‘verified resellers,’ which is a designation intended to reassure buyers. But this designation often does little more than lend legitimacy to high-volume brokers operating at the edges of legality, as highlighted by recent FTC action against one large ticket broker firm.
“These big sellers generate enormous revenue for the platforms, so there’s little appetite to strictly police their practices until something goes very wrong,” one analyst told Digital Music News. Each resold ticket brings new commissions and fees, which incentivizes these secondary resale platforms to look away.
A single Taylor Swift ticket purchased for $600 by a broker during presale demonstrates this dynamic. That ticket can change hands multiple times across StubHub before concert night, each time incurring the platform’s 15% reseller fee. In one example, after changing hands five times on StubHub, the $600 ticket rose to $1,700 by the night of the concert.
Taylor Swift, her team, and the venue saw none of the secondary markup revenue. Meanwhile, StubHub collected $780 in pure fee revenue—more than the tickets’ original face value.
Preferential treatment for brokers deepens these systemic issues. Large-volume resellers often gain API access for bulk uploads, reduced transaction fees, faster payouts, and dedicated account management. Even when brokers double-sell tickets—listing the same barcode across multiple marketplaces—these sellers are rarely suspended because their bulk listings fuel platform liquidity.
For the unwitting consumer, StubHub and other secondary markets’ protections are weak in practice. While speculative listings are technically forbidden, enforcement is inconsistent. Fans often suffer the consequences. In the course of researching this series, I was able to find several people who purchased tickets from StubHub that appeared to be double-sold, leaving them with invalid tickets at the gate.
Similar experiences are shared across fan communities, from Bad Bunny’s concerts in Puerto Rico to limited-run Broadway performances. Repeated stories detail invalid tickets, duplications, and last-minute cancellations—while marketplaces point to their customer guarantees that often leave fans with little more than vouchers for future shows or delayed refunds.
Now the FTC has announced a major lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, alleging that illegal secondary market practices are driving up prices for consumers. That lawsuit highlights how Ticketmaster and Live Nation allegedly turned a blind eye to botting, while reselling those same tickets at inflated prices on its own secondary ticketing platform—often contrary to purchase limits set by artists and event organizers.
Ticketmaster also triple dips on fees each time a ticket changes hands—which can happen multiple times if brokers speculate by buying from each other and jacking up the price with each resale. Ticketmaster collects fees from brokers buying tickets, a broker reselling the ticket on Ticketmaster Resale, and a customer’s fee for buying from Ticketmaster Resale for the final sale.
Canada investigated Ticketmaster for its resale practices long before this FTC lawsuit dropped today. Several Canadian government agencies and journalists uncovered much of this behavior in 2018. Journalists for CBC News and the Toronto Star captured hidden camera footage of Ticketmaster recruiting professional ticket brokers at a conference in Las Vegas.
Ticketmaster reps supplied these brokers with software called TradeDesk, designed to help resell millions of dollars worth of tickets. The Ticketmaster employee admitted they turned a blind eye to scalpers who use fake identities and that Ticketmaster accounts can buy tickets straight from the box office to bypass ticket limits in place for fans.
“If you want to get a good show and the ticket limit is six or eight, you’re not going to make a living on six or eight tickets,” the Ticketmaster employee is caught on camera telling the journalist who is posing as a professional ticket scalper.
The Canadian Competition Bureau (CCB) and provincial authorities investigated Ticketmaster due to allegations it facilitated scalping via bulk ticket purchases and misleading pricing—but the CCB closed the investigation by saying it did not break federal competition legislation. Instead, Ticketmaster was fined for misleading advertising to the tune of $4.5 million for not including fees in those advertised prices.
The reality here is clear—both the primary and secondary ticketing platforms benefit regardless of the outcome for the actual customer. Every transaction delivers fees, even fraudulent or speculative ones. As long as fees remain more profitable than rigorous policing of the marketplace, then Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid Seats have little financial incentive to truly disrupt this grey market ticket broker ecosystem. For fans, that means paying inflated prices while artists and teams see none of the profit flowing through these secondary resales.
The story doesn’t end here, though. In our next piece, we’ll outline how brokers bypass non-transferable ticket restrictions imposed by Ticketmaster, often with tacit approval from the very platforms claiming they’re protecting fans.
