New York (CNN) — Taylor Swift’s fans went to court in Los Angeles on Monday to confront Ticketmaster, after the company had multiple failures to sell tickets online for the singer’s latest tour.
Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation are facing a lawsuit from the “Swifties,” as Taylor Swift’s fans are known, from across the country who came forward in December for “illegal conduct” at the chaotic ticket sales of the pop star tour. The plaintiffs claim that the ticketing giant violated, among other things, antitrust laws.
This Monday a hearing was held on the status of the case, that is, the status of a class action was discussed and, although the defense does not plan to request a class action, it asked to reserve the right to do so.
The arguments heard this Monday in the judicial hearing by the disgruntled followers are above all procedural. The plaintiffs ask Ticketmaster to award them at least $2,500 each in damages. But the lead plaintiff, Julie Barfuss of Salt Lake City, says the point of the case is to give fans a better chance to see their favorite artists.
“That first day I tried to get tickets a total of 41 times. It takes you out of the queue and you go back in, and then I kept getting errors,” Barfuss told CNN. “The second day I spent a couple of hours trying. When I finally got in and went to buy the tickets, they were like $1,400.”
Ticketmaster wants a motion to compel arbitration, which means it will force the prosecution to settle the matter out of court. The plaintiffs’ lawyer has to provide emails for what he estimates will be 340 plaintiffs by the end of the month.
The lead plaintiff’s attorney, John Genga, does not expect Ticketmaster to present any “irrefutable evidence” on Monday, he told CNN. But he claimed that all the experience of the followers is relevant to the case.
“All the experience is going to be relevant even to argue the motion to compel arbitration,” Genga said. “Because if they were in a rush or stuck in a line for eight hours, all of that can affect whether they knowingly agreed to something.”
The jurisdiction of the case was also discussed, although this point has not been resolved. The plaintiffs want the case to return to state courts, rather than federal ones.
The lawsuit alleges that Ticketmaster and its parent company acted anticompetitively, imposing higher prices on fans in the pre-sale, sale and resale markets. It claims that Ticketmaster forces concertgoers to use its site exclusively and controlled all registrations and access to Swift’s “The Eras Tour.”
“It has nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with Ticketmaster being the only place in town. It’s the only place to get tickets,” Swift fan Penny Harrison told CNN. “The hope is that 10 years from now they will look back and say this was the turning point. It was when the competition diversified and ticket prices went down.”
At Monday’s hearing, the “Swifties” are asking for a $2,500 fine for each infraction, which could add up quickly, considering the millions of angry fans who didn’t receive tickets.
The December lawsuit also alleged that since Ticketmaster has deals with the tour’s big arenas, Swift “has no choice” but to work with Ticketmaster due to the size of her fan base. She also alleges that Ticketmaster profits from the resale of tickets on the secondary market by adding a service fee to their exchange between fans.
“Ticketmaster is a monopoly that is only interested in getting every dollar it can out of a captive audience,” according to the lawsuit.
Ticket pre-sales for “The Eras Tour” frustrated Swift fans across the country in a debacle that made headlines for weeks. In November, “verified followers” were sent a pre-sale code, but when the sale began, high demand crashed the website and millions of “Swifties” were unable to get a ticket. Pre-sale of tickets for Capital One cardholders caused similar frustration, and Ticketmaster later canceled the sale to the general public, citing “extraordinarily high demand” and “insufficient inventory of remaining tickets”.
The lawsuit alleges that the company “intentionally and knowingly misled TaylorSwiftTix presale ticket holders by providing codes to 1.4 million ‘verified followers,'” despite a shortage of seats.
Ticketmaster said more than two million tickets were sold on the first day of sales for his upcoming tour, the most ever for an artist in a single day.
“Millions of fans waited up to eight hours and were unable to purchase tickets as a result of insufficient ticket releases,” the lawsuit said. “Ticketmaster intentionally provided codes when it couldn’t keep up with demand.”
In a since-retired blog post, Ticketmaster claimed that its “Verified Fans” system, a mechanism intended to kill bots by handing out pre-sale codes to individuals, was unable to keep up with intense demand. Some 3.5 million people signed up for the program to buy tickets for Swift’s tour, her “biggest record ever” for her. That unprecedented demand, combined with a “staggering number of attacks from bots, as well as followers who didn’t have invite codes,” drove “unprecedented traffic” to his site, Ticketmaster said, and essentially brought it out of business.
Ticketmaster apologized to Swift and her fans for the “terrible experience” some had trying to buy tickets and said it would work to “prop up our technology for the new bar that demand has set” for Swift’s tour.
The ticket sales debacle also drew the ire of several lawmakers, leading to a Justice Department investigation and a congressional hearing.
“We want answers. We want to know why it happened. We want to know if it could have been prevented. If it was preventable, why wasn’t it? What can we do to make the live events industry more accessible to the average consumer?” one of the plaintiffs, Joe Akmakjian of Denver, told CNN.
“I see this as a predatory monopoly, and if we can have a monopoly on something fun like sporting events and concerts, I’m worried that it will pave the way for monopolies in other industries, like healthcare and transportation that really affect how in which people live from day to day.
