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Canadian officials to investigate Ticketmaster / TicketsNow tie up
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 9 March 2009
Ticketmaster’s promotion of its US-based secondary ticketing website TicketsNow will again go under the regulatory spotlight following the news the Canadian government has formally asked its Competition Bureau to investigate.
As previously reported, Ticketmaster entered the secondary ticketing market (ie enabling online ticket touting) by buying TicketsNow last year, and started pointing customers in the US and Canada to it from their primary ticket sales site whenever they were unable to sell primary tickets to an event.
Consumer groups complained that the ticketing firm, which makes a commission from both the primary and secondary sites, were not properly explaining the implications of buying tickets from the latter rather than the former, ie that the seller will not be official, and that there may be a large mark-up on the ticket, so that expensive tickets are not necessarily for the best seat in the house.
Initially Ticketmaster denied those claims, saying that the TicketsNow link up was an added value service, that it meant that their customers were more likely to get tickets for in-demand events, and that it gave some guarantees to people buying tickets from online touts. But then Bruce Springsteen complained about his fans being forwarded to TicketsNow for tickets to his gigs, and Ticketmaster quickly backtracked and said it would be reviewing the way it promoted its secondary service via its main website.
After the Springsteen protest, competition officials in the US state of New Jersey investigated the co-promotion that went on between the two sister companies and subsequently demanded that all weblinks between the two websites be removed for the time being, as well as insisting on various other measures, mainly linked to the resale of Springsteen tickets via Tickets Now. The ticketing giant agreed to the New Jersey officials’ demands. Meanwhile in Canada one ticket buyer has begun civil proceedings against Ticketmaster after buying an overpriced ticket on TicketsNow.
While legal types don’t reckon much to that civil action, Canadian officials may as yet make similar demands to those issued by their counterparts in New Jersey. Confirming he had ordered a formal investigation into the Ticketmaster/TicketsNow situation, Canada’s Industry Minister Tony Clement told the country’s parliament: “The government will not stand idly by when there is potential that companies are engaging in uncompetitive practices that are hurting consumers. And that’s why I am referring this matter directly to the Competition Bureau for their review”.
He added: “I want an investigation to determine whether Ticketmaster is abusing its position as a ticket seller by bumping people off their site to another site which sells the tickets at a multiple of many times higher than the original price”.
Ticketmaster told Reuters it would be happy to participate in any review of its activities. It also said that some of the criticism regarding the tie up between Ticketmaster and TicketsNow was based on untrue allegations that the company diverted some of its primary ticket allocation to the resale site in order to sell them at a greater mark up. The ticketing firm stressed: “Ticketmaster goes to great lengths to ensure that members of the public have the most fair opportunity possible to buy tickets in the primary market”.
