A new Senate investigative report is putting fresh weight behind one of the central criticisms long aimed at Live Nation and Ticketmaster: that many of the practices fans most hate were not simply the byproduct of bots, brokers, or outside “bad actors,” but the result of deliberate business decisions made inside the dominant ticketing company itself.
Released Monday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the report says the panel reviewed more than 110,000 pages of internal documents, contracts, strategy materials, communications and consumer complaints during a nearly three-year inquiry into Ticketmaster’s role in soaring ticket prices and fees. The resulting picture is one of a company that, according to the report, pushed artists and venues toward earlier resale activation, more aggressive dynamic pricing, and revenue-maximizing onsale tactics even as it publicly insisted many of those outcomes were outside its control.
In the works for three years, this investigation kicked off in March of 2023, in the wake of the messy Taylor Swift Eras Tour sales meltdown. Live Nation reportedly wasn’t very forthcoming at first, requiring a subpoena filed in November of the same year to cough up relevant documents.
The report, titled So Casually Cruel: How Ticketmaster’s Monopoly Supercharges Prices and Fees, argues that Ticketmaster’s market power allowed it to shape the very conditions that later fueled public outrage. It says the company, which the report notes controls roughly 80% of the U.S. concert ticketing market by many estimates, “leveraged its control of the market to push these parties to take actions that raise consumer prices.”
That theme runs through each of the report’s major findings.
Resale as a growth strategy
On resale, the report does not merely contend that tickets wound up on secondary marketplaces at inflated prices. It argues that Ticketmaster increasingly treated resale — particularly fan resale integrated into its own platform — as a major growth engine, and pushed to make those tickets available as early as possible, including in some instances before tickets were available to the general public. The report points to internal Ticketmaster material showing the company tracking the time between onsale and activation of its integrated TM+ resale product, then pushing to shorten that window from days to minutes.
The report’s Bad Bunny case study is especially striking. It cites an April 2021 internal presentation describing the artist’s onsale as “the largest onsale day in TMR history,” driven not by sheer ticket volume but by extraordinarily high average resale prices of $795 per ticket. The same presentation said Ticketmaster could have generated an additional $7 million in gross transaction value if resale had been activated during presale, and concluded: “New data capabilities will strengthen our case for fewer resale restrictions on key onsales.”
That language is likely to draw particular scrutiny because it suggests Ticketmaster was not merely reacting to resale activity elsewhere in the market. According to the report, it was actively building an internal case for getting more inventory into resale sooner, and for reducing artist-imposed limits that kept those listings from appearing. The report also says 20 of 29 Bad Bunny shows took resale orders before the local noon onsale, even though the agreed activation threshold was supposed to be much later.
Just as important for a consumer audience, the report argues that Ticketmaster’s tightly integrated resale display may have contributed to fan confusion. It cites complaints from buyers who said they did not realize they had purchased resale tickets at marked-up prices through Ticketmaster’s own interface. In one example quoted by the report, a fan wrote: “There wasn’t anything that CLEARLY alerted me that I was purchasing tickets from a third party at double [the] actual value.”
Dynamic pricing pushed from within
The report’s dynamic-pricing findings are similarly pointed. Ticketmaster has long argued that artists and venues decide whether to use Platinum tickets or dynamic pricing tools. The Senate report does not dispute that artists retain formal authority over many of those choices, but it says internal records show Ticketmaster was actively encouraging wider adoption because higher ticket prices also meant more fee revenue for the company.
Among the internal materials cited is a board presentation calling for higher revenue by “driving price, particularly through increased platinum allocations.” Another email, according to the report, discussed using one artist’s success with Pricemaster as an example for others “to see the light.” By June 2022, the report says, every one of the company’s top 30 touring acts was using Pricemaster, while the number of dynamically priced tickets sold for North American concerts had increased more than 700% between 2019 and 2022.
The supporting exhibits included in the report deepen that picture. One October 2022 deck argued that because Platinum tickets represented only about 4% of a stadium tour’s sold inventory, there was “opportunity to increase platinum allocations on upcoming tour.” Another recommended making 8% to 10% of an arena “standard” Platinum allocation. Still another described Pricemaster as “an integral pricing tool to use throughout the entire sales cycle.”
When the blame game turns inward
Some of the most politically potent material in the report deals not with ticket prices themselves but with the company’s public explanations for ticketing meltdowns.
The Subcommittee argues that Ticketmaster’s own records undercut its habit of blaming bots, extraordinary demand, or outside actors when major onsales went sideways. During Morgan Wallen’s 2021 presale, for example, the report cites an internal update stating that multiple requests were made to “slow” or “pause” the queue so teams could reprice tickets, leaving “thousands in the queue waiting for what was very few tickets at the time.” In March 2022, the report says, another employee warned of ongoing issues “affecting pricers’ ability to transact during busy onsales.”
The report then turns to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour presale — the most visible ticketing failure of the last several years. Ticketmaster publicly blamed staggering bot traffic and extraordinary fan demand. But according to emails cited by the Senate report, internal discussions pointed to aging infrastructure as part of the problem. The report says Ticketmaster President Mark Yovich attributed the outages to “old legacy pages [that] went down,” while Michael Rapino questioned internally whether the outcome would have been the same absent the outage given that demand was already known in advance.
Taken together, those examples form the report’s central argument: that Ticketmaster was not just standing in the middle of a chaotic marketplace, but was often shaping that chaos in ways that increased prices, sped inventory into more profitable channels, and strained the systems fans depended on.
The money behind the model
The financial story outlined by the report helps explain why that matters. The Subcommittee says Ticketmaster’s gross transaction value rose 164% from 2017 to 2023, while total revenue rose 203% over that stretch, outpacing the increase in the underlying face value of tickets. It also says the company locked resale economics into venue contracts, with post-2017 deals often pushing resale seller and buyer fees higher and, in one 2022 agreement, allowing Ticketmaster to keep 90% of concert resale fee revenue for ten years.
For critics of the company, those figures help explain why practices around dynamic pricing, integrated resale, and tighter control over high-demand onsales have become such a flashpoint. The report’s argument is that these were not isolated tactics, but parts of a broader system that rewarded scarcity, opacity and ever-higher consumer costs.
What comes next
The report closes with several policy recommendations, including continuing efforts to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, considering a federal cap on resale prices, and passing stronger restrictions on deceptive and abusive ticketing practices. The most broadly relevant of those proposals may be the least ideological: clearer upfront pricing, prohibitions on tickets changing price during checkout, and more conspicuous labeling or separation of resale inventory from primary listings.
Those transparency issues are likely to resonate well beyond the report’s more controversial proposals. Whatever one’s view of resale markets, the strongest new material here is not an argument that resale itself is the problem. It is the report’s contention that Ticketmaster used its dominance across primary ticketing, resale integration, pricing tools, and venue relationships to profit from confusion and scarcity — and then too often pointed the finger elsewhere when fans were furious.
TicketNews will be producing further reports on this sprawling investigative document, so stay tuned for some deep dives on what the lawmakers found.
