If you haven’t changed the password on your Ticketmaster account recently, you probably want to. The online ticketing company continues to face the fallout from a data breach earlier this year that affected more than 500 million customers, and customers are bearing the brunt.
Business Insider It was reported yesterday about a string of customers checking their emails only to find that someone had hacked into their Ticketmaster accounts and transferred their tickets:
In September, Vashti-Jasmine McKenzie noticed an event that had mysteriously disappeared from Google Calendar. It was a reminder of Usher’s concert in Dallas on October 5, synced with his Ticketmaster account.
McKenzie opened her email in shock: The night before, a stranger had hacked into her account, accessed two of McKenzie’s tickets, for which she had paid $550, and removed them from her account.
McKenzie was eventually able to get her tickets back to her thanks to Ticketmaster customer support. Others were not so lucky: Business Insider he identified another person whose tickets were stolen, they were returned to them by Ticketmaster, he came to visit their concert and found two people who found out that their tickets had been swiped when they got to the gate. Reddit, likewise, is home to many complaints from users who say similar things have happened to them.
Ticketing is big business these days, so it’s no surprise that Ticketmaster accounts are so expensive. It’s still unclear how exactly customer accounts were accessed—following the Ticketmaster breach, security experts say it doesn’t appear passwords were compromised. And you can imagine that any technology company today uses hashing rather than storing passwords in plain text.
Either way, hackers appear to have been able to access Ticketmaster accounts, adding a major headache to the company’s difficult few years.
Live Nation, which is the parent company of Ticketmaster, was sued in May by the Department of Justice for antitrust, and the organization says that the ticketing giant is anti-competitive by requiring artists to use Ticketmaster at the venues it operates. In addition to managing tickets through Ticketmaster, Live Nation handles promotions for many of the largest concert venues in the US, and operates hundreds of venues on its own. It basically offers whole soup in peanut packets.
It’s not just the Justice Department that’s mad at Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Concerts have been frustrated by companies for years due to mismanagement of ticket sales, including using visible crowd lines and “shift pricing” to raise prices for high-demand tickets. It’s gotten to the point where some have been put off even going to concerts if they have to deal with Ticketmaster—which is a lot of the time.
The argument against these companies is that, because they control ticket sales for nearly 70% of the largest concert venues in the US, they have no incentive to develop, and use their power to attract venues and artists. In 2023, a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation concluded that Ticketmaster’s exclusive contracts created significant barriers to entry for competitors. Licensing, permitting, and other regulatory hurdles favor players like Live Nation and Ticketmaster who can manage costs. from NPR an article written at the time:
Klobuchar sees three key issues with Ticketmaster, as he explained in both the interview and his opening statement at the hearing: It controls more than 70% of the market for tickets and live events, it controls much of the promotion of those events, and it either owns or has a multi-year exclusive contract with many major venues. .
Live Nation was allowed to reacquire Ticketmaster in 2010 after it signed an agreement that, among other things, it would not retaliate against venues that chose other ticket providers, meaning they could still promote through Live Nation. But again, Live Nation controls a lot of the big venues, which requires the use of Ticketmaster. Live Nation, on the other hand, has argued that it operates in a free market, pointing to competitors such as AXS and SeatGeek, and saying that its scale has allowed it to offer better technology and lower prices to consumers. Its market share has declined slightly since 2010 and its prices are comparable to other ticket markets, it said.
However, things are moving forward, especially under another Trump administration, today the fact is that Ticketmaster still dominates, so if you have to use it, we recommend that you change your password, enable two-factor authentication, and turn on account notifications in any account. try ticket transfer.
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