The Machine Behind the Price: How Ticketmaster Engineers Your Decision to Pay More

The lawsuit filed on March 18, 2025 describes something that tens of millions of concert-goers, sports fans, and theater enthusiasts already know in their bones but have never had spelled out in federal court language: Ticketmaster is running a textbook bait-and-switch, and they have been doing it deliberately for years. The legal term is “drip pricing” or “partitioned pricing.” In plain language, it means you see one price, you make your decision based on that price, and then the real price appears only after you’ve already invested time, energy, and personal information into the purchase process.

Here is what actually happens. You go to Ticketmaster.com. You find your event. You see seats listed at $32.00 per ticket. You pick your two seats. The subtotal shows $64.00 in bold. Somewhere in smaller font above the bold number is a tiny link that says “+ Fees,” but clicking it takes you to a webpage that explains how fees are “determined” in vague corporate language, without telling you a single actual dollar figure. You click “Next.” You are now on a Sign In page. You log into your account or create one. The clock in the upper right corner of the screen — an eight-minute countdown — begins ticking. You sign in. You arrive at the Checkout page. For the first time, you see the real number: $112.06. The fees are buried in a dropdown you have to click to see. Inside it: a $19.50 Service Fee, a $16.00 Facility Charge, and a $6.00 Order Processing Fee. Total hidden fees: $41.50. The advertised price increased by 65%. The clock says you have less than three minutes left. A pop-up flashes: “Tickets are selling fast. Get yours now before they’re gone.”

That pop-up is called a “dark pattern.” The countdown clock is a dark pattern. Requiring sign-in before revealing the price is a dark pattern. The complaint identifies six specific categories of dark pattern manipulation Ticketmaster deploys: Scarcity, Urgency, Obstruction, Information Hiding, Interface Interference, and Coerced Action. Each one is engineered to break down your resistance and ensure that when the real price finally appears, you’re too invested, too rushed, and too psychologically committed to back out.

The research backing this up is not just intuition. A peer-reviewed study in Marketing Science — the leading academic journal in the field — confirmed that consumers “buy more tickets and tickets at higher prices” when fees are hidden until the end. A separate study found that consumers exposed to drip pricing “are significantly more likely to: (1) initially select the option with the lower base price, (2) make a financial mistake by ultimately selecting the option that has a higher total price than the alternative option, and (3) be relatively dissatisfied with their choice.” Ticketmaster, as the highest-volume ticket seller in the country, is almost certainly aware of this research. The complaint explicitly states that conclusion.

The White House put a dollar figure on the national cost of junk fee schemes like this one: over $90 billion per year extracted from American consumers. President Biden called junk fees out directly in his 2024 State of the Union address, noting that they “add up to hundreds of dollars a month” and “make it harder for you to pay your bills.” The people in the back of that arena — the ones who saved up to see a show — were already paying Ticketmaster for the privilege of being manipulated.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What This Costs People That No Settlement Will Ever Pay Back

Courts deal in dollars. They add up the fees, subtract the advertised price, and arrive at a number called damages. But there is a whole layer of harm in this case that does not convert neatly into a dollar amount, and it is the layer that actually touches people’s lives. Four women — Michelle Madrigal from California, Helen Pantuso from Florida, Jessica Tempest from New York, and Tracey Sunde from Illinois — put their names on this lawsuit. They are not corporate plaintiffs. They are not hedge funds or institutional investors. They are people who wanted to see a show. They made plans. They looked up tickets. They saw a price they could work with. They went through the whole process. And at the end of it, they found out that what they had budgeted for was a lie.

Michelle Madrigal wanted to see blink-182. She wanted to go to a live event in Nevada. She sat in her home in California, selected her seats, built her plan around a $290-per-ticket price she saw displayed on her screen, and proceeded through a purchase process she thought was getting her closer to a real total. Instead, she was walked through a multi-page commitment trap that added $163.85 in fees she did not know about to a $870 advertised total. The complaint documents two separate purchases she made — a blink-182 concert in California, and a separate Nevada event. Both times, the price she relied on was not the price she was charged. Both times, the decision she made was not fully informed. The dignity of making an autonomous purchase decision — knowing what something costs before you commit to it — was taken from her twice.

Helen Pantuso bought tickets twice. The first time, she paid $57.95 in undisclosed fees on top of a $270 advertised price. The second time, $158.20 in hidden fees stacked onto a $777 advertised total. That is $216.15 in fees she never saw coming across just two purchases — nearly a quarter of her full spending on those events extracted through a process she had no real ability to opt out of. Pantuso is from Florida, a state that is not on Ticketmaster’s shortlist of jurisdictions where the company bothers to show all-in pricing from the start. The system is not malfunctioning in Florida. The system is working exactly as designed in Florida.

Jessica Tempest paid $60 in hidden fees on two tickets she thought cost $180. That is a 33% markup appearing only at the end of a pressured purchase flow. Tracey Sunde paid $19.56 in hidden fees on a single $49.50 ticket — almost a 40% markup. For someone on a limited income, spending nearly $75 on what looked like a $50 ticket is not just an inconvenience. It is the difference between going and not going. It is a budget decision that Ticketmaster made for them, without telling them, after it was too late to turn back without losing everything they had already put into the process.

The countdown clock deserves its own paragraph in this ledger. Eight minutes. That is how long Ticketmaster gives you, once you have reached the sign-in page, to do the following: sign into your account or create one from scratch, read a 23-page Terms of Use agreement, absorb the fee breakdown for the first time, consider parking add-ons, ticket insurance offers, donation requests, understand that the price just went up significantly, and decide whether to proceed. The complaint documents this sequence in order. The clock runs while all of that is happening. If the clock hits zero before you click buy, your tickets expire and you have to start the whole process over. The clock is not there to protect ticket availability. There is no technological reason tickets need to be held for exactly eight minutes and not twelve or twenty. The clock is there to prevent you from thinking too hard about the number on the screen.

The people hardest hit by this scheme are also the ones who had the fewest resources to absorb the surprise. Live entertainment is not a luxury product anymore — it is one of the main communal experiences left in American life. A concert is how you mark a birthday, celebrate a milestone, spend time with your kids, feel something real after a grinding week. When a company with 70% market share manipulates the price discovery process for that experience, it is not just taking money. It is corrupting the moment. It is turning a night out into a source of stress and financial regret. The White House cited junk fees as costing Americans over $90 billion annually. The emotional toll of being systematically deceived by the one company you cannot avoid does not show up in that $90 billion figure.

Legal Receipts: Their Words, Under Oath, in the Record

“Ticketmaster advertises a deceptively low price to sell more tickets at higher prices.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 3

“In its scheme, Ticketmaster uses a deceptively low upfront price to lure consumers into the purchase flow for tickets—the bait. Then, once Ticketmaster has lured Plaintiffs and consumers like them into the transaction with a deceptively low price, Ticketmaster adds exorbitant junk fees (in unpredictable amounts) after Plaintiffs and consumers had already relied on the low advertised price and made the decision to buy.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 2

“Ticketmaster is well aware that deferring disclosures of mandatory fees is a deceptive practice that is unfair to consumers.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 4

“Technologically, it is no more difficult for [a] ticketing company to show the all-in price throughout the shopping and purchasing experience than it is to show it only at checkout.”

Live Nation Comment to Proposed Rule, FTC-2023-0064-3306 (Feb. 7, 2024), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 4

“In many instances, deferring disclosure of mandatory fees is inherently deceptive or unfair. As explained in Live Nation’s 2020 Congressional testimony, some marketplaces take advantage of disclosing the fees later in the purchasing process to deceive customers by manipulating the list price of a ticket, making the ticket price appear less expensive upfront. These marketplaces represent to consumers the price of a ticket that is intentionally reduced, only to add the amount of the reduction (or more) into the fees charged later in a transaction.”

Live Nation Comment to Proposed Rule, FTC-2023-0064-3306 (Feb. 7, 2024), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 130

“With all-in pricing, the first price fans see should be the price they pay. In other words, fans can see upfront the full ticket price, inclusive of all mandatory fees, from the first time a fan sees a ticket. This practice allows consumers to comparison shop with greater ease and certainty, eliminating the surprise of added fees when the consumer proceeds to the ticket purchase page.”

Live Nation Comment to Proposed Rule, FTC-2023-0064-3306 (Feb. 7, 2024), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 130

“It is, of course, possible to communicate the true price of a ticket with a ‘face value’ amount and conspicuous disclosures of fees. But why should it be any work at all for a consumer to see the all-in price? . . . consumers just want to know how much it will cost to see the show or game. They want to know the all-in price at the outset of their search.”

Live Nation Comment to Proposed Rule, FTC-2023-0064-3306 (Feb. 7, 2024), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 130

“If Ticketmaster implements all-in pricing but other ticketing marketplaces do not, it risks losing site traffic and, ultimately, sales because such other platforms can list a lower price upfront to draw in consumers, even if their final price once fees are added is higher than the price offered by Ticketmaster.”

Live Nation Comment to Proposed Rule, FTC-2023-0064-3306 (Feb. 7, 2024), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 132

“Live Nation ‘expect[s] that revenue from primary ticketing services, which consists primarily of our portion of per ticket convenience charges and per order service fees, will continue to comprise the substantial majority of our Ticketing segment revenue.'”

Live Nation Entertainment 2023 Annual Report, cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 91

“Revenue from our ticketing operations primarily consists of service fees charged at the time a ticket for an event is sold.”

Live Nation Entertainment 2023 Annual Report, at 46, cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 91

“Defendants thus recognize (1) that the artificially low price advertised at the start of the transaction is deceptive, (2) that it is no more difficult to show the full ticket price to consumers from the beginning, and (3) that it is better for their bottom line to continue using dark patterns to interfere with consumer decision making.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 133

“Even worse, Ticketmaster selectively displays the full price (inclusive of all mandatory fees) to customers when the event is scheduled to occur in certain states—showing that Ticketmaster is capable and has its own systems set up to display pricing up front instead of deceptively hiding it at the end.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 5

“To make matters worse, Ticketmaster uses a countdown clock to create a false sense of investment and urgency for consumers and to distract from and obfuscate the fact that the total purchase price at checkout is significantly higher than originally advertised.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 6

“The scale of Defendants’ malfeasance is enormous. In 2023, Live Nation, through Ticketmaster LLC, collected fees on 329 million tickets. Extrapolated over the proposed class period, Defendants have collected unfair and deceptive fees through their drip pricing practices on as many as 1 billion tickets.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 7

“In approximately eight minutes the countdown clock runs, customers (1) sign into sign up for a Ticketmaster account, (2) must review all of the information on the ‘CHECKOUT’ screen regarding fees and add-on items, such as parking, ticket insurance, and donations, (3) are expected to read and agree to Defendants’ ‘Terms of Use,’ which, if printed on standard 8.5×11 paper would total 23 pages, and (4) must understand the increase in the cost of their tickets.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 106

“Considering the ‘Service Fee’ as an example, which can range from less than 1% of the ticket cost to 48%, while the nominal cost of the Order Processing Fee ranged from $3.95 to $6.00. Other fees that Ticketmaster charges—such as the Service Fee and the Facility Charge—also lack any discernable formula for how they are set. Thus, even a repeat consumer cannot anticipate the amount of the fees that Ticketmaster will add to the advertised cost prior to checkout.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 115

“The study . . . concluded that ‘disclosing fees upfront reduces both the quantity and quality of purchases.’ It also concluded that the sequential partitioned pricing ‘makes price comparisons difficult and results in consumers spending more than they would otherwise.'”

Tom Blake et al., Price Salience and Product Choice, 40 Marketing Science 4 (July-Aug. 2021), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 126

“The Ninth Circuit held that New Era ADR’s nonsensical arbitration rules made it ‘impossible for plaintiffs to present their claims on equal footing to Live Nation.'”

Heckman v. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., 120 F.4th 670, 688 (9th Cir. 2024), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 118

“‘junk fees may not matter to the very wealthy, but they matter to most other folks in homes like the one I grew up in, like many of you did. They add up to hundreds of dollars a month. They make it harder for you to pay your bills.'”

President Biden, State of the Union Address (2024), cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 62

“Drip pricing interferes with consumers’ ability to price-compare and manipulates them into paying fees that are either hidden entirely or not presented until late in the transaction, after the consumer already has spent significant time selecting and finalizing a product or service plan to purchase.”

FTC Staff Report, Bringing Dark Patterns to Light (September 2022), at 9, cited in Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 112 n.30

“Live Nation controls about 70% of the market for ticketing services for live entertainment events.”

Case 2:25-cv-02375, ¶ 86