If there’s one group of people you should avoid pissing off, it’s Swifties. Ticketmaster is finding out the hard way just what power Taylor’s fanbase holds, with more than 20 fans now banding together to sue the company after the fiasco to secure tickets to the artist’s upcoming US tour.
According to a lawsuit seen by Deadline, 26 fans have accused Ticketmaster — owned by Live Nation Entertainment — of “fraud, price-fixing, and antitrust violations” as well as “intentional deception” that allegedly resulted in most of the tickets for the highly-anticipated The Eras Tour to be snapped up by scalpers.
“For years, scalpers have been a problem in the secondary market. Ticketmaster has stated that it has taken steps to address the issue, but in reality, has taken steps to make additional profit from the scalped tickets,” the lawsuit reads.
The fans claim that Ticketmaster’s control of both the primary ticket sales and the secondary ticket sales, which must be re-sold on the platform for an additional fee under Ticketmaster’s Secondary Ticket Exchange platform, allowed the company to benefit from scalpers.
“Ticketmaster claimed that only those with codes would be able to join the presale, but millions of buyers without codes were able to get tickets,” the lawsuit reads. “Many of those without codes were scalpers, and Ticketmaster benefited from scalped tickets as they must be resold on Ticketmaster, who gets an additional fee.”
For context, Ticketmaster claims more than 3.5 million fans applied for presale codes, with two million tickets actually being sold in the presale. It is unclear how many of these were picked up by scalpers.
The lawsuit comes after Swift herself called out the ticketing giant for the poor handling of her latest tour.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” Swift wrote on Instagram. “It really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Soon after the backlash, and Swift’s complaint, Ticketmaster issued an apology to both Swift and her fans for the ticket sales chaos, but as we know all too well (10-minute version), an apology isn’t going to mean much to the people who missed out on tickets to Taylor’s first live show in years.
“We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans — especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets,” Ticketmaster said on Twitter. “We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened.”
The lawsuit comes after The New York Times reported that Live Nation Entertainment is under investigation by the US Department of Justice for antitrust concerns and an alleged abuse of power in the music industry.
Ticketmaster is yet to comment on the lawsuit.
Photo credit: Amy Sussman / Getty Images
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