Prestige Entertainment has denied allegations that it has previously used bots to acquire tickets on Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster filed a $10m (£7.5m/€8.5m) lawsuit against brokers that reportedly used bots to secure tickets for high-demand shows such as Broadway hit Hamilton.
The Live Nation subsidiary filed the suit in California in October against Prestige Entertainment, Renaissance Ventures and two individuals for allegedly buying tickets to various shows using technology that skirts the rules of the company’s efforts to prevent scalping.
Ticketmaster accuses the brokers of using bot software to swipe tickets as soon as they went on sale, meaning true fans missed out on face-value primary tickets and are instead forced to look on the secondary market where prices are often inflated.
However, ticket broker Prestige Entertainment has responded to the claims with a 46-page document denying the claims.
The filing confronts Ticketmaster’s practices related to the secondary market and repeatedly asserts that Ticketmaster does not make genuine efforts to keep tickets off the secondary market or to set up effective security measures.
The broker also said that Ticketmaster pushed tickets onto its own ticket resale exchange so that it gets service fees from the primary sale and commission fees from the resale, a practice referred to in the filing as “double-dipping”, Pollstar reports.
“TM provides no transparency to consumers about how and why tickets wind up on one or another exchange, and indeed TM and its suppliers deceptively slip tickets between primary and secondary markets to manipulate consumer pricing and squelch competition,” the filing stated.
Image: Pixies
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