A federal appeals court says Live Nation and Ticketmaster must face a class-action lawsuit alleging they charged “exorbitantly high” prices to thousands of ticket buyers, ruling that the concert giants cannot enforce “opaque and unfair” user agreements to eliminate treatment.
Live Nation claimed that fans had waived their right to sue when they bought their tickets, arguing that they had signed agreements promising to resolve any legal disputes through private arbitration — a common requirement when purchasing event tickets and other services. from many companies.
But in a ruling on Monday (October 28), the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Live Nation's agreements were “unconscionable and unenforceable” as they would make it “impossible” for fans to fairly assert claims against the company.
“Forced to accept terms that are subject to change without notice, the plaintiff must then arbitrate under … opaque and unfair rules,” the appeals court wrote. “The rules and terms are so unduly harsh or one-sided that they undoubtedly represent a systematic effort to enforce arbitration as an inferior forum.”
The ruling described Live Nation's agreements in scathing terms, calling them “so dense, complex and internally contradictory as to be borderline incomprehensible” and “poorly drafted and riddled with typographical errors.” The terms were so confusing, the court said, that Live Nation's own lawyers “tried to explain the rules” during a court hearing.
A representative for Live Nation did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday (Oct. 31).
The decision came as Live Nation faces a sweeping antitrust lawsuit from the US Department of Justice, seeking to break up the company on allegations that it illegally maintained a monopoly in the live entertainment industry. That separate action, which could take years to resolve, remains pending.
The class-action lawsuit against Live Nation, filed in 2022, accuses the company of violating antitrust laws by monopolizing the concert ticket market and engaging in “predatory” behavior. Filed on behalf of “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of ticket buyers, the suit alleges Live Nation and Ticketmaster abused their dominance to charge consumers “extremely high” prices.
The lawsuit was something of a follow-up to an earlier class action lawsuit in which the same legal team (from the law firm Quinn Emanuel) made very similar claims against Live Nation. That previous case was dismissed after a federal judge ruled that such charges must be handled through private litigation because of the agreements the plaintiffs signed when they bought their tickets.
In Monday's ruling, the Ninth Circuit said the earlier victory was both a gift and a curse for Live Nation. Although it had allowed the company to avoid a class action, the ruling raised the unsettling prospect of facing thousands of individual arbitration cases at once.
“Defendants have predicted that if their proposal is forced [arbitration] In that case, they would face a large number of parallel individual claims from ticket purchasers,” the appeals court wrote. “In anticipation of such claims, defendants have sought to arbitrate some of the advantages of class-level litigation while suffering few of its disadvantages.”
According to the ruling, that involved amending its terms of service to require fans to submit to “novel and unusual” procedures for “mass arbitration” offered by a new arbitration company called New Era ADR.
It was that new arbitration agreement that the appeals court declared unenforceable in Monday's ruling. The court slammed the rules, saying they placed unfair terms on any consumer who wanted to pursue a dispute with Live Nation. And, citing the company's market share, the court said fans had little choice but to sign the deal.
“Because Ticketmaster is the exclusive ticket seller for virtually all live concerts at major venues, prospective ticket purchasers in most cases are faced with a choice,” the court wrote. “They can either use the Ticketmaster website and accept its terms, or they can refuse to use the website and be completely banned from buying tickets on the primary market.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/live-nation-class-action-high-ticket-prices-court/
