Scorned Swifties Sue Ticketmaster After Taylor Swift Ticket Purchase Fiasco

Following the disastrous ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour last month, a group of the singer’s fans has now sued Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, accusing the company of fraud, anti-competitive conduct, and other transgressions.

The complaint, filed in a Los Angeles county court, accuses Ticketmaster of running an illegal monopoly that dominates the ticket sale market, squashes competitors, and has no motivation to charge reasonable fees or provide competent ticketing services because it has a stranglehold on the market. 

The complaint further charges Ticketmaster with intentionally misleading customers by claiming that only those fans with presale codes would be permitted to purchase tickets, but then allowing bots and scalpers to overwhelm its platform and squeeze legitimate presale purchasers out, with the result that millions of purchasers without presale codes were allowed to purchase tickets.  Specifically, the complaint accuses Ticketmaster of encouraging this result because it also controls the resale market, so it receives additional fees every time a scalper sells a ticket on the resale market.

Ticketmaster has blamed “bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic” on its sales platform, but has not acknowledged the central role that its actions have played in this debacle and similar situations that seem to occur frequently when tickets go on sale for a popular artist. 

Regardless of how this lawsuit turns out, this incident will likely continue to stir consumer outrage and anger over Ticketmaster’s business practices.  As Lina Khan, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, was quoted as saying, the Taylor Swift ticketing fiasco has “ended up converting more Gen Zers into anti-monopolists overnight than anything I could have done.”