Live Nation confesses to selling Metallica tickets on resale market

A secretly recorded phone call leaked to Billboard now revealed that event promoting firm Live Nation placed Metallica tickets directly on the resale market without giving fans a chance to purchase the tickets for the original price.

The phone call from February 2017 hears Bob Roux, the president of Live Nation's U.S. concerts, speaking to a business partner as well as an event promoter who was tasked by a Metallica associate to sell 88,000 tickets via secondary ticketing companies such as Viagogo or StubHub. They discuss their plan to place tickets for Metallica's 2017 WorldWired stadium tour in North America directly on the resale market, with Roux stating that Live Nation's official ticketing subsidiary Ticketmaster "will not do it".

In a statement to Billboard, a spokesperson for Live Nation confesses that the allegations are true: "After seeing the volume of secondary transactions for that show and the benefit being captured by brokers, the independent consultant worked with Live Nation on a unique distribution strategy that used the secondary market as a sales distribution channel for select high-end tickets".

Live Nation's spokesperson also claims that other artists used this strategy between 2016 and 2017 to profit from secondary sellers: "About a dozen artists out of the thousands we work with asked us to do this". Since then, the requests have declined, according to Live Nation.

Allegedly, the band members of Metallica didn't know about the sale via secondary ticketing companies. However, the aforementioned consultant, named Tony DiCioccio, is described by people who worked with the band as "family" to the Metallica members.

In July of 2018, the Irish government accepted an amended version of the ticket touting bill to curb ticket touting.