Ticketmaster is being sued by a Toronto man for “wrongfully, unlawfully (and) maliciously conspiring” to make people pay more for concert tickets via its TicketsNow site, a subsidiary of the ticketing behemoth. (Read it here.) And to this I say: Yay!
I think it’s crazy what’s been going on since Ticketmaster bought Ticketsnow last year. Ticketsnow is, essentially, an online scalper, that resells (ostensibly) legitimately purchased tickets. The thing is, the prices are scalpers’ prices. And they are owned by Ticketmaster. And they’ll have boatloads of tickets when Ticketmaster says it’s sold out. WTF???? We encountered this shifty business last summer for Radiohead tickets. Ticketmaster said they were sold out and redicted us to Ticketsnow, where tickets were 4x the price. This was mere minutes after they went on sale. We were stunned.
However, we are not the only ones ticked off about this. Bruce Springsteen was livid last week when it happened to his fans, and then this week, this story breaks. (The plantiff, Henryk Krajewski, had the same thing happen to him over Smashing Pumpkins tickets.) Go Henryk! You speak for us all, bro.
In other Ticketmaster news, it might be merging with Live Nation. Yep, that should really fix things up.
