Tag: ticketmaster
Ticketmaster faces antitrust scrutiny in Mexico following Bad Bunny ticket sales fiasco
The head of Profeco, Mexico’s consumer protection watchdog, has promised to sue Ticketmaster following a ticketing snafu in the country’s capital, reports The New York Times. On the weekend of December 9th, Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny was scheduled to play two soldout shows in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, the largest stadium in Latin America. The Friday night date saw thousands of fans denied entry to the venue after they were told by Estadio Azteca staff the tickets they bought directly from Ticketmaster were fake.
Profeco accused the company of overselling tickets. According to the agency, more than 1,600 ticket holders were denied entry on the first night, and another 110 on the following evening. “Ticketmaster claimed they were counterfeit, but they were all issued by them,” Profeco head Ricardo Sheffield told local news outlets. Ticketmaster has agreed to refund all affected fans the full price of their ticket, plus a 20 percent compensation fee. Profeco is preparing to file a class-action lawsuit against the company. Ticketmaster Mexico could also be fined up to 10 percent of its total sales in 2021. “As we are a fiscal authority, if they don’t want to pay of their own will, we will seize their accounts then, and they will pay because they have to,” Sheffield said.
📍Si compraste boletos para el concierto de #BadBunny el pasado 9 y 10 de diciembre en el #EstadioAzteca, y te negaron el acceso.
Ingresa a 🔗https://t.co/VIrQmLsrL9 y comienza tu proceso de reclamación de reembolso total + bonificación no menor al 20% del precio pagado. pic.twitter.com/hs3TUa3J64
— Profeco (@Profeco) December 15, 2022
In a statement Ticketmaster posted to Twitter this week, the company denied the claim it oversold tickets. It blamed the event on demand for Bad Bunny tickets – saying more than 4.5 million people tried to purchase just 120,000 stubs – and scalpers who sold fake tickets. “On Friday, an unprecedented number of false tickets, not bought through our official channels, were presented at the gates,” the company said, according to an Associated Press translation. “The situation, in addition to confusion among access control personnel, caused temporary interruptions in the ticket reading system, which unfortunately momentarily impeded recognition of legitimate tickets.”
Información importante con respecto al concierto de @sanbenito (#BadBunny) en el @EstadioAzteca 👇 pic.twitter.com/LCmp5L1fvo
— Ticketmaster México (@Ticketmaster_Me) December 12, 2022
In November, Democratic lawmakers, including House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, began calling for the break up of Ticketmaster after the company botched sales of Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets. “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” Ocasio-Cortez said last month. The US Department of Justice reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster parent company LiveNation before the Swift fiasco. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumers recently announced it would hold a hearing on the company’s recent failures.
Ticketmaster could be fined over this weekend’s Bad Bunny ticketing problems
Ticketmaster apologises after Bad Bunny fans denied entry to Mexico City show
Taylor Swift fans sue Ticketmaster over The Eras Tour ticketing meltdown
Swifties are suing Ticketmaster over presale mess
Taylor Swift recently told fans to draw their cat eyes sharp enough to kill a man, and Swifties have taken the advice to heart. Twenty-six Taylor Swift fans are uniting in an attempt to take down LiveNation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, following its botched handling of ticket sales for Swift’s The Eras Tour in November.
A lawsuit submitted in Los Angeles County claims that Ticketmaster’s “anticompetitive scheme” includes forcing fans and artists to exclusively use its platform and its “Secondary Ticket Exchange” to buy and sell tickets. It also claims that Ticketmaster “willfully, purposely, and intentionally deceived” buyers in the ways it promoted and distributed presale codes, in particular, that it “failed to disclose that they had sent more codes than they could accommodate with tickets.”
The complaint seeks $2,500 per violation. According to Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei, “14 million people hit the site” hoping to purchase tickets to The Era Tour. He estimated that that is enough people to fill 900 stadiums. Even if we assume that only 10 million of those hits were legitimate, Ticketmaster would still be obligated to make up to $25 billion in payouts.
In November, Mashable spoke to Swifties about the agonizing wait and frustrating errors that plagued the ticket-buying process. Blake Barnett, a 30-year-old lawyer said, “We were sitting in pre-waiting lines for two or three hours… right when I got ‘You’re the next in line,’ it gave me an error code and said rejoin the queue. I was shoved back behind 38,000 people. That happened three times.”
In response, Barnett formed an LLC named Vigilante Legal to take up the mantle against Ticketmaster. On Twitter yesterday, Vigilante Legal acknowledged the lawsuit but noted they are not involved.
The tangled ticketing mess also drew the attention of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who tweeted about Ticketmaster’s monopoly on the industry. Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and ranking member, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, recently announced that they would hold a Senate hearing on competition in the ticket industry. And the New York Times has reported that the Department of Justice was already looking into Live Nation over antitrust concerns.
In the ’90s, “America’s most powerful rock band” Pearl Jam attempted to take on Ticketmaster’s monopoly and lost in court. Now, a new generation has been radicalized.
Taylor Swift fans are suing Ticketmaster over presale disaster
A group of 26 Taylor Swift fans are suing Ticketmaster following last month’s ticketing fiasco that left frustrated users unable to buy tickets for Swift’s The Eras Tour (via Deadline). In a lawsuit submitted to a California court, the fans accuse Ticketmaster’s parent company, LiveNation, of “anticompetitive conduct” that let scalpers snap up a surplus of tickets, resulting in higher ticket prices for the fans who could actually get their hands on them.
In addition to alleging that Ticketmaster forces fans to “exclusively” use the service to purchase tickets at prices “above what a competitive market price would be,” the suit claims Ticketmaster also profits off the resale of those tickets through its secondary marketplace. As outlined…
Did You Miss It? #Swifties Sue Ticketmaster Over Taylor Swift ‘Eras Tour’ Ticket Fiasco
‘Look what you made me do’ takes on a new meaning for Taylor Swift fans, affectionately called #Swifties, in the wake of ongoing calls for better regulation of event ticket handling at Ticketmaster – the world’s largest ticket sales and distribution company.
As reported, the fan group was bested by ‘unprecedented bots’ on the Ticketmaster site after Swift announced her latest stadium trek, ‘The Eras Tour,’
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