A group of Taylor Swift fans are suing Ticketmaster over the fiasco regarding its November 15 ticket presale for the pop star's new Eras Tour.
The Swifties are accusing the distribution company of anticompetitive conduct after the upcoming tour's presale crashed Ticketmaster's site, which left the waiting for a long time.
The Lawsuit Highlights Scalpers And Scammers During Ticket Selling
According to The Verge, a group of 26 fans came together to file a lawsuit against Ticketmaster in a California court, accusing it of intentional deception.
The lawsuit alleges that the company committed fraud, engaged in price fixing, and other antitrust violations that allowed scammers and scalpers to buy most tickets.
It is important to note that Ticketmaster is the primary controller of the ticket sales in the market, but the lawsuit claims that it remained unready for the Eras Tour presale fiasco despite this.
The fans also accused that the company forces them to exclusively use their service to buy tickets at a price by profiting off their resale in a secondary market.
Additionally, Swifties allege that Ticketmaster conspired with a third-party to make customers pay for more expensive tickets, misleading those who want to use their service for a long time,
"Millions of fans waited up to eight hours and were unable to purchase tickets as a result of insufficient ticket releases, but Ticketmaster intentionally provided codes when it could not satisfy demands," fans argue.
With this, Deadline reports that the lawsuit filed at the LA county requires for the distributor to pay a civil fine of $2,500 per violation.
According to Jennifer Kinder, one of the lawyers representing the Swifties, says that while the case has not been accepted by the court yet, there should be some progress on Monday.
Ticketmaster has since apologized to Taylor Swift and her fans for the incident, blaming the surge of bot attacks for creating traffic in their servers.
This caused a lot of fans to get locked out of their registered accounts and those who had special codes allowing ticket purchases were unable to access Ticketmaster.
Following the incident, Swift has also expressed her frustrations on the chaotic presale ticketing on Instagram, citing the difficulties her fans have to face just to purchase tickets, Deadline writes.
The Senate Wants To Investigate Ticketmasters Market Monopoly After The Disastrous Event
According to the ticket distributor, there were more than 3.5 million people who registered for the presale of Swift's Eras Tour tickets.
Because of this, they had to put 2 million fans on the waitlist as the company's site crashed due to the unprecedented demand.
The incident delayed some of the Ticketmaster's presales until tickets were eventually sold out before they could even go public.
According to The Verge, this caught the attention of lawmakers like Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee, who said that a hearing will be called to examine Ticketmaster's monopoly of the ticketing industry.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also raised the same concern on Twitter as she claims that Ticketmaster's merger with its now parent company LiveNation should not have happened.
It can be remembered that the Department of Justice is also investigating reports of antitrust concerns involving LiveNation.
