Live Nation CEO on (not) being hacked by brokers who do use bots to get tickets though (and how NIN is good)

From: Bob Lefsetz
To: Nathan Hubbard

Is this true? That buyers of DMB and Phish tickets at livenation.com were redirected to coasttocoast.com?

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From: Nathan Hubbard

Sorry, been traveling.

No it’s not to my knowledge. Have not had fan complaints about this and we monitor issues in the email and call center hourly. We DID find out that a couple of these broker sites including gotthetix.com were using the Live Nation name in their Google ads and displaying the ads when someone searched “Live Nation.” This happened in late June. We filed a trademark complaint with Google soon after. But no redirect from the buy button.

We do of course know that many brokers get their tickets using bots that vault them to the front of the line. It sucks for us (we have to build a costly infrastructure that can essentially handle an attack), and more importantly it sucks for the fan (lack of available inventory). We continue to work on technologies that thwart these efforts, and dynamic pricing to address the underlying economic reasons why the secondary market exists.

Thanks for highlighting the great stuff NIN does via Musictoday (part of Live Nation Ticketing). These really are the two options to address the issue; restrict transferability and ask the fan to jump through a few hoops to prove their identity, or price the tickets at what the market is willing to pay. They aren’t mutually exclusive