Live Nation and Ticketmaster filed their formal answer to the Federal Trade Commission's BOTS Act lawsuit on October 13, 2026, in federal court in California. The 37-page filing says the companies have spent more than $1 billion since 2010 fighting scalper technology, and claims nearly every major advance against ticket bots came from them. The FTC's case says the opposite problem: that Ticketmaster let brokers beat its limits and collected fees on the resale.
The answer comes about two weeks after U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong refused to throw the case out on September 28, the ruling we covered in Judge Rules Ticketmaster Can Be Prosecuted Under the BOTS Act. That ruling decided only that the case can go forward. Nothing has been proven, and Live Nation and Ticketmaster deny wrongdoing.
What does Live Nation say in its answer?
The defense is built on a simple picture: Ticketmaster is the victim of scalpers, not their partner. According to Digital Music News, the filing says the companies invested “over $1 billion since 2010 to prevent scalpers' industrial-scale, technology-driven ticket purchasing and to protect fans' access to primary ticket sales.” It adds that Ticketmaster “detected and blocked nearly 260 million attempts daily by bots to access its services” in 2025.
The sharpest argument is about incentives. Under the FTC's reading, Live Nation says, a platform with no limits and no anti-bot tools would face no BOTS Act exposure at all, because there would be nothing to circumvent.
Under the Commission's reading, by contrast, any new abuse-prevention measure or ticket limit Ticketmaster deploys becomes a new source of potential liability whenever a determined scalper finds a way around it.Live Nation and Ticketmaster's answer, as quoted by Digital Music News
TicketNews, which read the filing, reports that the companies also argue the 2016 law was written to protect ticket issuers, that Ticketmaster does not legally “sell or offer to sell” resale tickets under the Act, and that its posted limits describe per-account caps rather than a promise that no multi-account broker gets through.
What does the FTC say Ticketmaster did?
The FTC and seven states (Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia) sued on September 18, 2025. Their complaint does not say Ticketmaster failed to stop every bot. It alleges the company knew about specific brokers and let them keep buying. Music Business Worldwide quoted the complaint saying that “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 more profit for themselves when reselling those tickets on the secondary market.”
The motive alleged is fees. The complaint says Ticketmaster can “triple dip,” earning fees from brokers on the primary purchase, from brokers again on resale, and from the fans who buy those resale tickets.
| Point | Live Nation's answer | The FTC's allegation |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | $1 billion+ spent since 2010; nearly 260 million bot attempts blocked a day in 2025 | In a 2018 review, five brokers controlled 6,345 accounts and 246,407 tickets across 2,594 events |
| Limits | Posted limits are per account | A senior executive allegedly wrote the companies would “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers exceeding limits |
| Resale | Ticketmaster does not “sell or offer to sell” resale tickets under the Act | Ticketmaster collects fees at each step of the resale |
TicketNews notes one admission in the answer worth watching: Ticketmaster acknowledges it collects fees on secondary sales, including from sellers, and that a resold ticket is voided and reissued to the buyer. Whether that makes it a seller under the law is the fight ahead.
Blocking 260 million bots a day and waving through five known brokers are not opposite claims. They can both be true.
Why this matters past one courtroom
The arms race is not slowing. On October 13, 2026, Raye said her Royal Albert Hall presale drew 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats, and that bots had filed fake registrations at a scale she had never seen. That sale did not run on Ticketmaster, but it shows what every platform faces. The FTC case asks a narrower question: not whether a platform fights bots in general, but what it does when it can see who is breaking its rules and makes money on the result.
According to TicketNews, the FTC and the states proposed an April 24, 2028 jury trial, the companies proposed an October 2, 2028 bench trial, and a scheduling conference is set for October 29. It runs alongside Live Nation's other legal fronts, including the Justice Department antitrust case that frames our piece on Michael Rapino's contract running through 2031.