Fans of pop music superstar
The 26 plaintiffs from 13 states in the lawsuit against
The antitrust accusations charge that Ticketmaster manipulated the secondary ticket market which amounts to price discrimination. Ticketmaster also engaged in price fixing by "allying with scalpers," to affect prices.
"Ticketmaster is a monopoly that is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public," the lawsuit said.
While Ticketmaster has competitors, the model used in the Eras tour pre-sale prevented ticket seekers from shopping around for cheaper alternatives. Ticketmaster gave pre-sale codes to about 1.4 million customers in its "verified fans" system, even though there was a known shortage of available tickets.
The plaintiffs are seeking penalties and damages arising from fraud, misrepresentation and fraudulent inducement. The penalty sought is
Ticketmaster canceled general ticket sales for the tour after a fumbled pre-sale. Fans who took part in the pre-sale were stuck in queues for hours and faced error messages due to the high demand for tickets.
"Based on information and belief, Ticketmaster intentionally and knowingly scheduled a general sale of tickets knowing they would not have the quantity necessary to facilitate the sale," the lawsuit reads.
"Ticketmaster has effectuated this anticompetitive scheme by forcing fans of musicians to exclusively use Ticketmaster for pre-sale and sales prices, which are above what a competitive market price would be."
On.
Swift also weighed in on the fiasco.
"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," she said.
"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."
According to Swift, about 2.4 million people bought tickets to the tour.
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