{"id":3169,"date":"2024-10-31T20:59:38","date_gmt":"2024-10-31T20:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/live-nation-must-face-class-action-over-high-ticket-prices-says-court\/"},"modified":"2024-10-31T20:59:38","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T20:59:38","slug":"live-nation-must-face-class-action-over-high-ticket-prices-says-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/live-nation-must-face-class-action-over-high-ticket-prices-says-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Live Nation Must Face Class Action Over High Ticket Prices, Says Court"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tA federal appeals court says Live Nation and Ticketmaster must face a class action claiming they charged \u201cextraordinarily high\u201d prices to thousands of ticket buyers, ruling that the concert giants cannot enforce \u201copaque and unfair\u201d user agreements to scuttle the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

\n\tLive Nation claimed fans had waived their right to sue in court when they bought their tickets, arguing they had signed agreements promising to litigate any legal disputes via private arbitration \u2014 a common requirement when purchasing event tickets and other services from many companies.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a ruling Monday (Oct. 28), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Live Nation\u2019s agreements were \u201cunconscionable and unenforceable\u201d since they would make it \u201cimpossible\u201d for fans to fairly pursue claims against the company.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cForced to accept terms that can be changed without notice, a plaintiff then must arbitrate under \u2026 opaque and unfair rules,\u201d the appeals court wrote. \u201cThe rules and the terms are so overly harsh or one-sided as to unequivocally represent a systematic effort to impose arbitration as an inferior forum.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ruling described Live Nation\u2019s agreements in scathing terms, calling them \u201cso dense, convoluted and internally contradictory to be borderline unintelligible\u201d and \u201cpoorly drafted and riddled with typos.\u201d The terms were so confusing, the court said, that Live Nation\u2019s own attorneys \u201cstruggled to explain the rules\u201d during a court hearing.<\/p>\n

\n\tA spokesperson for Live Nation did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday (Oct. 31).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ruling came as Live Nation is facing a sweeping antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice, seeking to break up the company over allegations that it illegally maintained a monopoly in the live entertainment industry. That separate action, which could take years to resolve, remains pending.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe class action against Live Nation, filed in 2022, accuses the company of violating antitrust laws by monopolizing the market for concert tickets and engaging in \u201cpredatory\u201d behavior. Filed on behalf of \u00a0\u201chundreds of thousands if not millions\u201d of ticket buyers, the case claims Live Nation and Ticketmaster abused their dominance to charge \u201cextraordinarily high\u201d prices to consumers.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit was something of a sequel to an earlier class action, in which the same legal team (from the law firm Quinn Emanuel) made highly-similar claims against Live Nation. That earlier case was dismissed after a federal judge ruled that such accusations must be handled via private litigation because of agreements that the plaintiffs had signed when they purchased their tickets.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Monday\u2019s ruling, the Ninth Circuit said that earlier victory had been both a gift and a curse for Live Nation. Though it had allowed the company to avoid a class-action lawsuit, the ruling raised the troubling prospect of facing thousands of individual arbitration cases all at once.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDefendants foresaw that if their motion to compel [arbitration] in that case were granted, they would be faced with a large number of parallel individual claims by ticket purchasers,\u201d the appeals court wrote. \u201cIn anticipation of such claims, defendants sought to gain in arbitration some of the advantages of class-wide litigation while suffering few of its disadvantages.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to the ruling, doing so involved amending its terms of use to require fans to submit to \u201cnovel and unusual\u201d procedures for \u201cmass arbitration\u201d offered by a new arbitration company called New Era ADR.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was this new arbitration agreement that the appeals court declared unenforceable in Monday\u2019s ruling. The court roundly criticized the rules, saying they had placed unfair terms on any consumers who wanted to litigate a dispute with Live Nation. And, citing the company\u2019s market share, the court said fans had almost no choice but to sign the agreement.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBecause Ticketmaster is the exclusive ticket seller for almost all live concerts in large venues, prospective ticket buyers in most instances are faced with a choice,\u201d the court wrote. \u201cThey can either use Ticketmaster\u2019s website and accept its terms, or refuse to use the website and be entirely foreclosed from purchasing tickets on the primary market.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal appeals court says Live Nation and Ticketmaster must face a class action claiming they charged \u201cextraordinarily high\u201d prices to thousands of ticket buyers, ruling that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[715,650,143,422,327,344,1206,648,1453],"class_list":["post-3169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-action","tag-class","tag-court","tag-face","tag-high","tag-live","tag-nation","tag-prices","tag-ticket"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}