More than two dozen Taylor Swift fans across 13 states are suing Ticketmaster for the way it mishandled ticket sales for her upcoming Eras Tour,
According to documents obtained by Deadline, the lawsuit was submitted Friday in Los Angeles County District Court. Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s California-based parent company, was accused by 26 plaintiffs of violating the state’s Cartwright Act and Unfair Competition Law. The plaintiffs accuse Live Nation of fraud, price fixing, antitrust violations, and “intentional misrepresentation.”
EW has reached out to Ticketmaster but did not immediately hear back.
Henning Kaiser/picture alliance via Getty Images The ‘Midnights’ album by Taylor Swift, released this year on Oct. 21, just narrowly missed the window for Grammys consideration.
“Millions of fans waited up to eight hours and were unable to purchase tickets,” the suit reads, as reported by Rolling Stone. The plaintiffs allege that Ticketmaster “intentionally and purposefully” misled ticket purchasers “by allowing scalpers and bots access to TaylorSwiftTix presale.”
While some fans were able to score the highly-coveted tickets, the experience left many heartbroken, and broke, with some resale ticket prices ranging anywhere from $400 to $31,000-plus for a single ticket on websites like StubHub and SeatGeek.
Tickets first went on pre-sale Nov. 15 for users who qualified for Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program, and within minutes people were complaining about site errors and long waits, with some fans being in a queue for more than five hours.
And, just hours after that sale started, Ticketmaster announced that buyers hoping for tickets to shows on the West Coast — Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Santa Clara, Calif. — wouldn’t be able to start buying at 10 a.m. local venue time as planned, but instead would have to come back at 3 p.m. Additionally, the Capital One Cardholder Presale was rescheduled from Tuesday to Wednesday, and that sale only lasted a few hours before it sold out.
The suit goes on to allege that Ticketmaster’s expansion into the secondary ticket market and its agreements with stadiums forced “fans to buy more expensive tickets” from which Ticketmaster received “additional fees from every time the tickets” were resold. The suit also claims the company “intentionally” provided codes “when it could not satisfy ticket demand.”
“There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets, and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” Swift said in a statement on Nov. 18. “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.”
Ticketmaster issued a statement of its own apologizing to Swift and her fans, but the Swifties are demanding blood. Or at least money. The suit seeks a civil fine of $2,500 per violation, as well as attorneys’ fees, and any court-deemed additional relief.
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