In May 2024, hackers from ShinyHunters stole 1.3 terabytes of data covering 560 million Ticketmaster customers — names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, partial credit card details. The breach exploited a Snowflake cloud database that lacked multi-factor authentication. The data was listed on the dark web for $500,000. At least 14 lawsuits followed.

In May 2024, the DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit to break up Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, hundreds of concert venues, artist management companies, and festival production. The DOJ alleged that Live Nation illegally maintained a monopoly over the live entertainment industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing agreements, retaliating against venues that used competitors, and acquiring potential rivals. The result: Ticketmaster controls approximately 80% of major venue ticketing in the US. Artists can't choose a different ticketing platform because Live Nation owns their venues. Venues can't choose competitors because of exclusive contracts. Fans have no alternative. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale (November 2022) crashed Ticketmaster's system, stranding millions of fans and exposing the fragility of a monopoly infrastructure. A system that can't handle demand because there's no competitor to absorb overflow.

A UC Berkeley field experiment with StubHub proved that hiding fees until checkout made users spend 21% more and complete 14% more purchases. Even experienced users who knew fees were coming still spent 15% more. StubHub used this behavioral exploitation as its default pricing model for years.