Taylor Swift fans are suing Ticketmaster.
Videos by American Songwriter
Alleging antitrust violations, fraud and price fixing, Swift’s fans may end up doing what Pearl Jam and others haven’t been able to in the past. Take down the ticketing giant.
When Swift’s The Eras Tour launched its pre-sale through Ticketmaster, the demand crashed the ticketing platform’s system. A general sale never even took place, as a result.
This put the Swifties over the edge. They are suing Ticketmaster over alleged mismanagement.
TMZ has reported that a group of fans kicked off the lawsuit in Los Angeles County, where Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, is located.
The suit accuses the ticketing giant of being poorly prepared for The Eras Tour, even going as far as to call the situation “intentional deception.”
According to reports, Ticketmaster planned for some 1.5 million fans to buy tickets on the November 15 pre-sale but 14 million showed up. Additionally, the suit’s plaintiffs say, Ticketmaster was supposed to send out “Verified Fan” pre-sale codes on November 14 but they were never received.
The suit also implies that the ticketing platform indeed wanted staplers and bots to come in, drive up prices and create a situation where Ticketmaster could collect additional fees.
As TMZ reports, Swifties are looking to get back the “ill-gotten gains” Ticketmaster has garnered through the disingenuous pre-sale of some tickets.
When the problems were going on with her pre-sale, Swift issued a statement that read, “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
The United States Senate’s antitrust officials will also reportedly hold hearings on the issue of monopolies in the live music ticketing sphere. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently shared a tweet calling Live Nation’s ownership of Ticketmaster inappropriate. The two companies merged in 2010. They are estimated to control 70 percent of the ticketing market.
Photo: ABC
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