The Federal Trade Commission with seven states has sued giant Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary for raising ticket prices by illegally working with scalpers and deceptive bait-and-switch pricing.

Much-sued Live Nation controls roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market, the suit noted, saying that from 2019 to 2024 alone, consumers spent more than $82.6 billion purchasing tickets from Ticketmaster.

As tickets become harder to find and prices soar, the company has blamed scalpers. But, says the suit, “Defendants have tacitly worked with those very same scalpers, allowing them to unlawfully purchase millions of dollars in tickets in the primary market, so that Defendants can extract

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