Watchdog in battle over ticket pricing practices
Ticketmaster, Live Nation challenged
TORONTO • The Commissioner of Competition is not backing down from its fight to stop Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment Inc. from allegedly using a deceptive ticket pricing practice.
In a Tuesday filing with the Competition Tribunal, the law enforcement watchdog challenged a previous claim from the companies that it is standard in e-commerce to advertise ticket prices without including the service fees, facility charges and processing fees that are tacked on later.
“Any bald suggestion that consumers would somehow be able to divine the actual cost of tickets before the Respondents choose to reveal them is simply incorrect,” said the commissioner in the filing. “Many other ecommerce companies, when promoting other products to consumers, present prices that are in fact attainable as the first price consumers see.”
The battle between the entertainment Goliaths and the watchdog has been raging since January, when the commissioner asked the tribunal to end alleged deceptive ticket pricing, after the commissioner had demanded that sports and entertainment ticket vendors review their marketing practices and display the full price up front.
At the time, the commissioner alleged that the companies’ pricing methods meant consumers are sometimes charged between 20 and 65 per cent more than what the tickets were initially advertised to cost, a practice it refers to as drip pricing. It is asking the Competition Tribunal to end the companies’ alleged deceptive marketing practice and make them pay an administrative monetary penalty.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but have staunchly fought the claims, saying the commissioner is either misunderstanding or misconstruing the ticket process and stressing that its practices are “standard in the ticketing industry,” “transparent, pro-consumer and proper.”
“Ticketmaster never suggests or implies that there are no fees associated with a consumer’s purchase. The opposite is true,” it said in a response to the application it filed with the tribunal.
“Consumers who purchase tickets online are aware that they will pay fees above the unit price of a ticket.”
The battle between the Competition bureau and Ticketmaster and Live Nation comes just months after the Ontario government handed the ticketing giants a victory of sorts, banning so-called scalper bots, which buy a large number of tickets online for an event and then resell them at a large profit.
When the bill passed in December, the industry welcomed the ban, with Ticketmaster saying it is in an “arms race” to develop new tools to combat the bots. In North America the company blocked five billion bots last year, an executive told the committee considering the bill.