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Jim Freeman, ex-Amazon Prime Video VP, joins Ticketmaster as CTO to lead 'AI-first' push. October 20, 2026 Ticketmaster has appointed former Amazon executive Jim Freeman as its Chief Technology Officer. The Live Nation-owned company has also hired Rachel Smith from Block as its first SVP of Data Science and Machine Learning, and ex-Disney executive Chuck Mortimore as SVP of Product. Ticketmaster announced the appointments on Monday (October 19), alongside the addition of the team behind AI startup Ragie. "Reliable, secure and personalized experiences depend on how effectively we use technology and data," said Saumil Mehta, Global President of Ticketmaster. "Jim, Rachel, Chuck and the Ragie.ai team will help us move faster, build better tools and deliver better outcomes for fans, artists, venues and clients." As CTO, Freeman will be responsible for the technology behind Ticketmaster's products for fans and clients, including what the company calls "a new generation of agentic, AI-powered tools." "Jim, Rachel, Chuck and the Ragie.ai team will help us move faster, build better tools and deliver better outcomes for fans, artists, venues and clients." Saumil Mehta, Ticketmaster Freeman will also oversee Ticketmaster's global engineering organization and platform modernization, continue work on its defenses against bots and "bad actors," and lead a push to make "every function AI-first" across the company. Ticketmaster says Freeman has spent more than 30 years running engineering teams at consumer technology businesses. As a VP at Amazon, he helped build and launch Prime Video, then scaled the service to more than 30 million monthly active users worldwide. He also launched Prime Video Direct and Amazon Channels, and expanded the service's device partnerships and distribution. Freeman later served as CTO of European fashion marketplace Zalando, which now connects more than 62 million active customers with 7,000 brands across 29 markets. Most recently, he was a Senior Advisor at Permira. Freeman fills a position that had been vacant since February, according to Variety. Ticketmaster's previous CTO, London-based Carlos Alvarez-Coch, left shortly before the US antitrust trial against Live Nation began on March 2. Smith joins Ticketmaster from Block, where she helped scale the data science teams behind Square, Cash App, and TIDAL. She was responsible for more than 120 data scientists across those businesses. At Ticketmaster, Smith will build what the company calls a "center of excellence for data science," extending its existing analytics work and making data more central to product development and business decisions. Ticketmaster says the move will create its first dedicated data science and machine learning organization, with a focus on fraud detection, bot mitigation, and the fan experience. Mortimore, meanwhile, will lead Ticketmaster's product strategy for identity, access, and trust. His remit covers how fans access and manage their accounts and tickets, as well as protections against "bad actors and unauthorized access," according to Ticketmaster. Mortimore has held product leadership roles at Disney, Stripe, Visa, and Salesforce over more than 20 years, following earlier engineering roles at Netscape and Sun Microsystems. At Disney, his most recent employer, he consolidated identity across the company's global businesses, including its theme parks, Disney+, and Hulu. Ticketmaster said the Ragie team, whose work focuses on AI infrastructure and retrieval technology, will help staff across the business build AI tools and put them to use. Ragie announced on July 27 that it was joining Ticketmaster, a deal Variety reported as an acquisition. Ragie's website still describes the company as a "fully managed RAG-as-a-Service platform," and now carries a banner announcing that "Ragie joins Ticketmaster." RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, is a technique that lets AI models draw on a company's own documents and data when generating answers. The appointments come almost a year after Mehta joined Ticketmaster as Global President, with a stated aim to "accelerate an AI transformation" at the company. Mehta previously spent more than nine years at Square, where he was most recently Chief Product Officer and Head of Business Org. In May, Ticketmaster cut around 350 jobs, or 8% of its global workforce, primarily in engineering, product, and design, according to Pollstar. "The purpose of [these cuts] is stronger prioritization, especially in engineering product and design," Mehta told Pollstar at the time. "That comes with flattening layers, consolidating ownership, changing how teams are structured and ensuring that we put more energy behind specific initiatives." Ticketmaster's controls on bots and ticket brokers are also the subject of a lawsuit brought against Live Nation and Ticketmaster by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states in September 2025. The complaint alleges that Ticketmaster knowingly allowed brokers to use hundreds or thousands of accounts to exceed artists' ticket limits, and that those tickets were then resold on Ticketmaster's own resale marketplace. In a court filing on October 13, Live Nation and Ticketmaster denied the FTC's claims, calling the lawsuit "misguided." "In 2025, Ticketmaster detected and blocked nearly 260 million attempts daily by bots to access its services, and currently blocks tens of thousands of suspected inauthentic account-creation attempts each day," the filing states. Separately, a federal jury in Manhattan found in April that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had illegally monopolized primary ticketing at major US concert venues, along with the market for large amphitheaters. Live Nation and Ticketmaster have asked the court to throw out the verdict or order a new trial. The coalition of 33 states and the District of Columbia that pressed the case to a verdict, after the DOJ settled its claims a week into the trial, is seeking the divestiture of Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster's revenues rose 15% year-over-year to USD $852 million in Q2 2026, with adjusted operating income up 14% to USD $331 million. The company says it processes more than 600 million tickets annually across more than 35 countries.Music Business Worldwide

Ticketmaster goes all-in on AI, names ex-amazon exec as chief technology officer. Bot attacks have plagued Ticketmaster for years, so to combat it, the ticketing service is shaking up its executive ranks and going all-in on AI. Ticketmaster has hired Jim Freeman as its chief technology officer, filling a slot left vacant since February after its London-based c Bot attacks have plagued Ticketmaster for years, so to combat it, the ticketing service is shaking up its executive ranks and going all-in on AI. Ticketmaster has hired Jim Freeman as its chief technology officer, filling a slot left vacant since February after its London-based c This story matters for Culture, Style & Media readers tracking venice. Reported by variety.com. Read the full original at the source link below. Originally reported by variety.com. VeniceNews.com curates and briefs the culture, style & media stories that matter. Its editorial policy

Live Nation filing calls FTC suit "perversion" of bots Act. In a fiery federal court filing, Live Nation asserts the FTC is distorting anti-bot laws and punishing Ticketmaster for third-party scalper abuse. Oct 16, 2026 Live Nation and Ticketmaster this week filed their answer to the high-stakes lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states. The live entertainment giant contends that federal regulators are misapplying the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS) by attempting to penalize the very platform the statute was designed to protect. * The Legal Filing: Live Nation and Ticketmaster submitted their formal Answer and 16 affirmative defenses in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California this week. * The Opponents: The FTC is joined by state attorneys general from Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia. * The Core Argument: Live Nation argues that the FTC is attempting to "flip the Act on its head" by holding ticketing companies liable when bad actors bypass their security measures, rather than prosecuting the scalpers running the bots. * The Defense Metrics: Ticketmaster reports investing more than $1 billion since 2010 to counter ticket scalping and claims it blocked nearly 260 million daily bot attempts in 2025. * The Constitutional Defenses: Live Nation raises 16 defenses, including violations of Due Process, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Major Questions Doctrine. More on all this below. * Live Nation and Ticketmaster also emphasized their advocacy for ticketing reform including lobbying for the original 2016 BOTS Act. Flipping the BOTS Act 'on its head' At the center of Live Nation's filing is statutory interpretation. Congress enacted the BOTS Act in 2016 to outlaw the technological circumvention of purchase limits and to penalize scalpers who sell tickets acquired through those means. Live Nation's legal teams at Latham & Watkins and Sidley Austin argue the statute distinguishes between bad-faith scalpers and primary ticket issuers. According to the filing: "The Commission seeks to flip the Act on its head by turning it against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the very companies the Act is intended to support. This perversion of the Act contradicts its plain meaning, flouts the will of Congress, and undoubtedly sets back the fight against scalpers." Citing legislative history from the Senate Commerce Committee, Live Nation says that lawmakers specifically framed primary sellers' safeguards as the frontline defense against automated ticket harvesting. Under prior FTC enforcement actions, Ticketmaster was consistently treated as the protected ticket issuer whose controls were circumvented by outside scalpers. Live Nation argues that the FTC's current theory reinterprets the statute to punish ticketing platforms whenever a determined scalper discovers a loophole, effectively transforming anti-bot legislation into a platform liability. Warnings of a 'chilling effect' on anti-bot security. Live Nation's response outlines what it characterizes as a dangerous paradox in the FTC's enforcement approach. Because BOTS Act liability hinges on circumventing safeguards used to enforce ticket limits, a ticketing company that implements zero purchase limits and zero anti-bot defenses faces no exposure under the statute at all. If courts determine that platforms face compound statutory liability whenever a third-party broker evades an anti-abuse control, Live Nation warns that ticketing platforms will face economic and regulatory pressure to abandon purchase caps and security measures entirely. Alternatively, platforms like it could be forced to severely curtail or shutter fan-to-fan resale marketplaces to avoid third-party liability, eliminating authenticated resale protections and driving consumers back to unregulated secondary black markets. Addressing the complaint's allegations regarding pricing transparency and ticket disclosures, Ticketmaster stated that it now operates with all-in pricing consistent with FTC regulations and denied engaging in unfair or deceptive acts. 16 affirmative defenses: Due Process and the Major Questions Doctrine. In addition to a general denial of wrongdoing, Live Nation asserted 16 formal defenses including: * Third-Party Causation: Any harm suffered was caused by the intervening and superseding actions of independent scalpers, not Ticketmaster. * Major Questions Doctrine: The FTC is attempting to unilaterally expand its regulatory authority across the entire secondary ticketing market without clear congressional authorization. * Constitutional Vagueness & Fair Notice: Applying BOTS Act terms like "circumvent" and "sell or offer to sell" against ticket platforms violates Due Process guarantees under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. * Selective Enforcement: The enforcement action constitutes arbitrary and unequal treatment under the Equal Protection Clause. * Good Faith & Public Interest: The company acted in good faith, and the sweeping injunctive remedies sought by regulators would disrupt live event ticketing and harm the broader public interest. What comes next in FTC vs Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Following Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong's decision to reject Live Nation's previous motion to dismiss, this litigation now enters an intensive, multi-year discovery phase. The court will enter a formal Pretrial and Scheduling Order setting binding discovery deadlines, opening the door for the FTC to subpoena Ticketmaster's internal communications with brokers, account-monitoring logs, and secondary fee revenue. Concurrently, Ticketmaster's legal team will prepare its defense in part by gathering technical information to demonstrate ongoing mitigation efforts against scalpers. This fact-finding and expert deposition process will likely dominate 2027, setting up summary judgment battles in early 2028 where Live Nation will formally challenge the FTC's statutory authority. The parties have already proposed vastly different trial schedules: the FTC and state plaintiffs are pushing for an April 24, 2028 jury trial date, while Live Nation and Ticketmaster are requesting an October 2028 trial kickoff. Get the latest Live Music & Industry News updated continuously from across the web under the Hypebot Industry News tab here.