Ticketmaster Names Jim Freeman CTO as Brazil Data Breach Raises Concerns

Ticketmaster is expanding its artificial intelligence capabilities under new chief technology officer Jim Freeman while addressing questions about customer data security following a breach affecting Brazilian ticket buyers. The Live Nation-owned ticketing company announced its leadership appointments on October 19, 2026, as the scope and timing of the separate security incident remain unclear.

According to Music Business Worldwide, Freeman will oversee global engineering, platform modernization, and AI development. The company also appointed Rachel Smith, formerly of Block, as senior vice president of data science and machine learning, and Chuck Mortimore, a former Disney executive, as senior vice president of product.

Ticketmaster said the appointments support its effort to integrate artificial intelligence across its operations, improve customer experiences, and strengthen protections against automated bots and unauthorized activity.

Saumil Mehta, global president of Ticketmaster, described technology and data as central to the company's services.

"Reliable, secure and personalized experiences depend on how effectively we use technology and data," said Saumil Mehta, Global President of Ticketmaster.

Freeman brings more than 30 years of engineering leadership experience, according to the company. At Amazon, he helped develop and launch Prime Video, subsequently scaling the service to more than 30 million monthly active users worldwide. He also held leadership positions at Zalando and served most recently as a senior advisor at Permira.

Ticketmaster said Freeman will oversee development of "a new generation of agentic, AI-powered tools." His responsibilities also include strengthening defenses against bots, modernizing the company's technology infrastructure, and making "every function AI-first" across the organization.

Smith previously led data science teams supporting Square, Cash App, and TIDAL at Block, overseeing more than 120 data scientists. At Ticketmaster, she will establish a "center of excellence for data science" focused on analytics, fraud detection, bot mitigation, and product development.

Mortimore will lead product strategy covering identity, account access, and trust. His experience includes roles at Disney, Stripe, Visa, and Salesforce, as well as earlier engineering positions at Netscape and Sun Microsystems.

The company also announced the addition of the team behind Ragie, an AI infrastructure startup specializing in retrieval technology. Its platform uses retrieval-augmented generation, which allows AI systems to draw on company documents and data when producing responses.

The appointments follow organizational changes earlier in 2026. According to Pollstar, Ticketmaster cut approximately 350 jobs in May, representing 8% of its global workforce, primarily affecting engineering, product, and design teams.

Mehta previously explained the rationale for the restructuring.

"The purpose of [these cuts] is stronger prioritization, especially in engineering product and design," Mehta told Pollstar.

Separately, Ticketmaster has confirmed a data breach involving Brazilian customers who purchased tickets during 2025. According to TicketNews, the exposed information potentially includes names, contact details, birth dates or age ranges, residential information, Brazilian CPF taxpayer identification numbers, and ticket-purchase records.

Payment-related information may include payment methods and the final four digits of credit cards. Ticketmaster said the incident stemmed from a temporary vulnerability in a third-party analytics tool rather than its primary ticketing infrastructure.

In a statement translated from Portuguese, the company said, "The ticket sales platform and fan account systems were not affected." Ticketmaster also maintained that passwords, complete credit card numbers, and bank account numbers were not compromised.

The company began notifying affected customers on October 14, according to TicketNews. Brazilian technology publication Canaltech reported that the investigation, conducted with external cybersecurity specialists, concluded in September 2026. Ticketmaster has not publicly disclosed the number of affected customers, the exact date of the breach, or the identity of the third-party provider.

Brazil's National Data Protection Authority, known as the ANPD, has received questions about the incident's scope and notification timeline. TicketNews reported that the agency acknowledged an inquiry and forwarded it to its technical department, but that response did not establish whether a formal investigation had begun.

The breach also comes amid separate legal and cybersecurity challenges for Live Nation and Ticketmaster. In September 2025, the Federal Trade Commission and seven states filed a lawsuit alleging that Ticketmaster knowingly allowed ticket brokers to exceed artists' purchase limits through multiple accounts.

In an October 13, 2026, court filing, Live Nation and Ticketmaster denied the allegations and described the lawsuit as "misguided." The filing stated that Ticketmaster detected and blocked nearly 260 million bot access attempts daily in 2025 and currently blocks tens of thousands of suspected fraudulent account-creation attempts each day.

In a separate matter, a federal jury in Manhattan found in April 2026 that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had illegally monopolized primary ticketing at major US concert venues and the market for large amphitheaters. The companies have asked the court to overturn the verdict or order a new trial.

Ticketmaster reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $852 million, an increase of 15% year over year, while adjusted operating income rose 14% to $331 million. The company says it processes more than 600 million tickets annually across more than 35 countries.