Hours before Live Nation and Ticketmaster revealed final merger plans, an Ontario man filed a class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster in Canada after he was maneuvered to the secondary ticket site TicketsNow while trying to buy seats for a Smashing Pumpkins show in November 2008.
In a situation eerily similar to the one that plagued Bruce Springsteen fans last week, the $410 million lawsuit alleges Henry Krajewski was redirected to TicketsNow after failing to buy C$66.50 (Canadian dollars) Smashing Pumpkins tickets; he instead paid C$533.65 for a pair of tix using the TicketsNow site as prompted by Ticketmaster. Ontario is a province where there are laws against reselling tickets on the secondary market at more than their face value, according to Billboard.biz.
During todays merger phone conference, Live Nations Michael Rapino spoke out against the suit, saying class action lawsuits have no merit, its like chasing cars down the road. Referring to Ticketmasters problems regarding redirects to TicketNow, he added, There was actually a glitch in the system that had nothing to do with availability of the tickets, it had to do with Visa [credit cards] that couldnt process the data and so it froze the system
There were people who misunderstood what we did and we said if anyone who brought tickets at a higher price wed make them good for that. There was no real controversy here, he added. The issue is that there is a secondary market. That has existed for a long time, now its called secondary, it used to be called scalpers, that is a reality.
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