Taylor Swift recently told fans to pull on their sharp cat eyes to kill someone, and Swifties took the advice to heart. Twenty-six fans of Taylor Swift are joining forces to try to take down LiveNation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, following poor ticket sales for Swift’s The Eras Tour in November.
The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County alleges Ticketmaster’s “anti-competitive practices” include forcing fans and artists to use its platform and “Secondary Ticket Exchange” to buy and sell tickets. It also alleges that Ticketmaster “intentionally, willfully, and intentionally misled” consumers in the way it promoted and distributed coupons, specifically, that it “failed to disclose that it sent more coupons than it would have for tickets.”
Meet the Swifties trying to take down Ticketmaster
The complaint seeks $2,500 in damages. According to Live Nation Chairman Greg Maffei, “14 million people hit the site” hoping to buy tickets to The Era Tour. He said the crowd was enough to fill 900 stadiums. Even if we assumed only 10 million of those hits were valid, Ticketmaster would have had to pay up to $25 billion in payouts.
In November, Mashable spoke to Swifties about the painful waits and frustrating mistakes that plagued the ticketing process. Blake Barnett, a 30-year-old lawyer said, “We were waiting two or three hours… I was pushed behind 38,000 people. That happened three times.
In response, Barnett formed an LLC called Vigilante Legal to take the suit against Ticketmaster. On Twitter yesterday, Vigilante Legal he admitted the crime but he realized that he was not affected.
The confusion over the misplaced tickets caught the attention of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) herself. tweeted about Ticketmaster’s stance on the industry. The Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and the ranking member, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, recently announced that they will hold a Senate hearing on competition in the ticketing industry. And the New York Times has said that the Department of Justice has previously investigated Live Nation for security concerns.
In the 90s, “America’s most powerful rock band” Pearl Jam tried to take over Ticketmaster and lost in court. Now, the new generation has changed a lot.
