Live Nation, Ticketmaster Hit With Antitrust Class Action Over Taylor Swift ‘The Eras’ Tour Ticket Sales

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In the wake of Taylor Swift’s “The Eras” Tour ticket sale debacle, Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, face a proposed class action over the ticket sellers’ alleged anticompetitive and misleading conduct concerning the presale, sale and resale of the highly anticipated concert tickets in November 2022.

The 34-page antitrust lawsuit alleges the monopoly Live Nation and Ticketmaster hold over the primary and secondary ticketing services market comes at the expense of consumers, specifically the 2.4 million Taylor Swift fans who may have unknowingly purchased “The Eras” Tour tickets at significantly inflated prices.

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As part of their “anticompetitive scheme,” the companies have coerced major concert venue operators, including virtually all venues hosting “The Eras” Tour, into long-term exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster, the case explains. Ticketmaster’s market dominance has evidently paid off, as over 70 percent of tickets for major concert venues in the United States are sold through Ticketmaster’s online platforms, the filing asserts.

Per the suit, Ticketmaster also uses technology that allows it to charge fees on every ticket that is resold by limiting buyers from transferring tickets “unless those tickets are resold through Ticketmaster’s secondary ticketing platform.” In this way, Ticketmaster can charge fees to both the reseller and buyer of each resold ticket, the case claims.

Whether they know it or not, consumers have no choice but to pay Ticketmaster’s monopolistic ticketing fees, which can increase the ticket’s original price by 20 to 80 percent, the case explains.

According to the complaint, Ticketmaster announced in early November that “The Eras” Tour tickets would be sold in three phases: the TaylorSwiftTix presale that select “verified” fans could participate in on November 15, the Capital One presale for Capital One cardholders on November 16, and the general public sale on November 18.

Ticketmaster claimed that the TaylorSwiftTix presale, open to 1.5 million fans who were to receive an access code, would “level the playing field so that more tickets go to fans who intend to go to the show – and not to ticket bots.” 

Notably, the complaint states that a single access code allowed for the purchase of up to six tickets, and each fan could receive up to three access codes. The 1.5 million access codes could purchase a total of 9 million tickets, even though Ticketmaster had only allocated 2 million tickets for the TaylorSwiftTix presale and 2.4 million tickets for the entire tour, the suit relays.

“This means that a single fan, or a scalper, could purchase as many as eighteen tickets during this presale,” the case says.

When November 15 and 16 rolled around, millions of verified fans could not complete their purchases largely due to technical issues brought on by unprecedented website traffic, the complaint says. 

As the case tells it, Ticketmaster permitted 14 million unverified users and a “staggering” number of bots to participate. The suit further charges that Ticketmaster let bots and scalpers to resell tickets to consumers during the presale for double and triple the face value prices, allowing the company to profit “substantially” from scalped ticket sales.

With its ticket inventory fully depleted, Ticketmaster canceled the general public sale on November 17, even though the company knew beforehand that it would be unable to meet demand during or after the presales, the case argues.

“Ticketmaster’s conduct here was and continues to be fraudulent because it has deceived and will likely continue to deceive consumers by failing to accurately disclose the available quantity of tickets, how to get tickets, who would be able to participate in the TaylorSwiftTix Presale, and the price of tickets,” the suit reads.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone in the United States who purchased one or more tickets to Taylor Swift’s “The Eras” Tour for personal, family, or household purposes.

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