Ticketmaster’s Fees Won in Canada, Face Trial in California — and the Two Courts Disagree About You

Two courts, six days apart, examined the same question about the person who buys a ticket from Ticketmaster. The court in Ottawa found her competent. The court in California found her captured by the first price she sees.

On September 22, Justice Denis Gascon of the Federal Court of Canada refused to certify a class action against Ticketmaster. Kamaria Kuling had bought two comedy-show tickets at CA$74.50 apiece in November 2023 and walked out with a CA$190 bill: a CA$29.50 service fee, a CA$9 facility charge, and a CA$2.50 order-processing fee stacked on CA$149 of face value. She sued in January 2024, arguing the tickets could not be had at the advertised price. By the certification hearing, the entire case had shrunk to the $2.50 fee. That is 1.3 percent of her bill, in bold black type on the same screen as the ticket price, directly above it, inside a message shorter than fifteen words. No scrolling. No second page.

Gascon’s reading of the Competition Act’s drip-pricing provisions turned on two ingredients: concealment and sequence. Drip pricing means luring a buyer with a lower headline number, then revealing the mandatory fees after she has committed, the decision getting made before the real total shows up. Ticketmaster’s screen did neither. Everything sat there at once. And Parliament, when it amended the Act in 2022, never wrote a single-all-in-price rule into it; Gascon declined to invent one from the bench. “Ordinary purchasers are capable of basic arithmetic,” he said, then used the occasion to dress down Kuling’s lawyers for abandoning most of their allegations on the eve of the hearing, and denied Ticketmaster’s CA$20,000 costs claim for its trouble.

In the other courtroom, arithmetic was never the point. Six days later, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in California denied Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s motion to dismiss the FTC’s lawsuit. The commission, joined by seven states, said Ticketmaster advertised face-value prices, disclosed the mandatory fees later in the flow, and let those fees inflate the total by as much as 44 percent. One example from the complaint: tickets listed at $189.99 came out at $242.55. That’s $53 above the advertised price, and $26 per ticket more than the buyer’s stated maximum budget.

The company argued the buyer always sees the full total before paying, so nothing is hidden. Frimpong said that cure arrives too late. She leaned on Ninth Circuit precedent holding that the FTC Act “is violated if it induces the first contact through deception, even if the buyer later becomes fully informed before entering the contract.” The advertised price is the one shoppers filter by. The checkout total lands after the choice is mostly made. Even a “+Fees” qualifier, the court said, could be vague and ambiguous: noting that fees exist tells the buyer nothing about what she will actually pay.

Put the two rulings next to each other and the buyer changes legal identity between them. One court puts the deception question at the moment of payment: were all the components on the screen, side by side, in legible type? The other puts it earlier. The advertised price is the one shoppers filter by, so the filter screen is where the deception, if any, happens. And under the American test, no reliance on the lower price has to be shown.

A federal judge in Maryland has read the same checkout flow a third way. Weighing a claim against Ticketmaster competitor Vivid Seats under that state’s consumer law, she threw it out: the plaintiff couldn’t say she would have skipped the purchase had she known the full price up front. Reliance is an element of the Maryland statute. The FTC’s Section 5 needs none of it.

The statutes keep the split alive. Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act and Ontario’s Ticket Sales Act already demand all-in pricing, and Gascon cited both as proof that legislators know how to write that rule when they want it; Parliament simply didn’t, in 2022. On the other side of the border, the FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees has required live-event sellers to show the full total, mandatory fees included, since May 2025. Yesterday’s checkout pages are being litigated in California. Tomorrow’s are already governed.

Ticketmaster said after the California ruling that it “continue[s] to believe that this lawsuit is misguided and will ultimately fail,” in a statement reported by Hypebot. Live Nation’s formal answer to the complaint, filed mid-October, calls the case a distortion of anti-bot law and says the companies have spent over $1 billion since 2010 fighting scalpers, framing itself as the fan’s bodyguard on the bot file while defending the fee structure on another. The FTC’s answer to that is an internal email the judge quoted, from a senior executive saying the company would “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to broker violations.

The California case now moves into discovery, which is expected to dominate 2027. The commission and the states want a jury trial starting April 24, 2028. Live Nation and Ticketmaster want October.