From Presale to Resale: the failure of Verified Fans.

After a disastrous ticket pre-sale day for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, more than 50 fans have joined a lawsuit against Ticketmaster, and its parent company, Live Nations to seek damages from the company. The plaintiffs claim that Ticketmaster and Live Nations violated the California Cartwright Act and Unfair Competition law.

Fans of Swift, or “Swifties” as they call themselves, were able to sign up to receive a presale code for a week prior to the opening of the verified fan presale on the Ticketmaster website. On November 14, access codes were released to fans. In addition, previous LoverFest ticket holders were promised a presale code for the next Taylor Swift tour due to the cancellation of her shows during the 2020 pandemic.

Thousands of these fans were not sent codes or were sent codes that were faulty. The plaintiffs claim that Ticketmaster has breached their contract with LoverFest ticket holders since they were not all given access to a presale code or any fan verification process.In addition, the lawsuit claims that there was an excessive distribution of codes which led to more than 3.5 million people being granted access to the ticket presale. This proved to be a challenge for Ticketmaster’s servers. Many verified fans were immediately sent to the waiting list for tickets, couldn’t access the ticket purchasing page or were simply stuck in the queue for hours.

Within the lawsuit, there is also a claim that Ticketmaster violated the Unfair Competition Law. Ticketmaster is the largest ticket providing company, especially after its merger with Live Nation in 2010. Since Ticketmaster has such a strong grip on the ticket purchasing process, the company offers a secondary ticket selling platform in which Ticketmaster ticket holders are able to sell their purchased tickets to other fans. This is where the main issues of the case arise.

The plaintiff claims that Ticketmaster is able to price jack their fees through their secondary ticket platform. Ticket holders are also able to set their own price for ticket purchase, which has historically led to a significant rise in ticket value, as well as provides anyone selling the ticket an opportunity to make a profit.

The case states that the largest venues, typically sports arenas, work exclusively with Ticketmaster for ticket sales, which has also led to ticket holders to struggle with any resale as these arenas may require members to only use the secondary ticketing platform, leading the company to have a near monopoly over the ticket selling market.

On November 17th, Ticketmaster cancelled the general sale of Eras Tour tickets which would have been released the following day. Ticketmaster stated the decision was made due to “insufficient quality of remaining spots.” It is still unknown if there will be a date set for general release tickets, or if Swift will be coordinating a separate plan for her fans