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More lawsuits for Ticketmaster over TicketsNow
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 3 April 2009
The lawsuits in relation to Ticketmaster’s promotion of its US secondary ticketing website Tickets Now via its primary website are starting to mount up.
As previously reported, until recently Ticketmaster promoted Tickets Now, the ticket touting website it bought last year, on the website where it was selling tickets as the officially primary seller. If it was unable to sell tickets to an event as the primary seller, for whatever reason, it would redirect people to sales of those tickets on Tickets Now. However, consumer groups argue, Ticketmaster failed to explain to their customers what a secondary ticketing website was, an in particular that tickets can be heavily marked up from their face value on such touting services.
Ticketmaster initially seemed unconcerned when consumer groups criticised it for promoting the secondary service on the primary website, but things changed when Bruce Springsteen accused the ticketing giant of ripping off his fans by sending them to Tickets Now without explaining what that meant. Apologies from Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff quickly followed, compensation for Springsteen fans was offered, and then the New Jersey District Attorney got involved and introduced various restrictions regarding the way Ticketmaster promotes Tickets Now in the future.
Despite the apologies and compensation and New Jersey DA ruling, civil lawsuits against Ticketmaster in relation to TicketsNow have been filed in both the US and Canada by customers who feel aggrieved that they paid marked-up prices for tickets on the secondary service after being redirected there from the ticketing firm’s official site. Though it’s not clear whether all of those who bought marked-up tickets from Tickets Now were necessarily totally ignorant of how touting websites work.
The latest lawsuit, reported on by Digital Music News, is in San Francisco, where one Shelia Campbell is suing after she bought a marked up ticket for a Detroit Pistons basketball game via Tickets Now. Her lawsuit says: “Until at least February 23, 2009, potential ticket purchasers searching for tickets on Ticketmaster.com at face value were systematically redirected to TicketsNow.com, where tickets are sold at a price considerably above face value”.
DMN observe that the mark ups on Campbell’s tickets, and the mark ups in another similar case regarding the purchase of Cirque du Soleil tickets, were nominal, and therefore, really, any reasonable compensation claim against Ticketmaster would be equally nominal, even in a US court. However, given how many people have probably bought marked up tickets via TicketsNow after being sent there from Ticketmaster.com, DMN reckons some US lawyers are keen to represent as many claimants as possible on this one, because the fees for them could be handsome, especially if they can make the claims a class action.
None of which is good news for Ticketmaster, who’d rather put all this behind them and concentrate their efforts on getting their proposed Live Nation merger approved. Given the headache Ticketmaster’s ‘if you can’t beat em join em’ dabblings in the secondary ticketing market have proven to be, an increasing number of people reckon the ticketing giant will look to offload TicketsNow, and may be its UK secondary ticketing site Get Me In, before its merger with Live Nation.
