Drake concert tickets at the centre of new Canadian class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster

A Montreal law firm has filed a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster, arguing the ticket giant “intentionally misleads consumers for their own financial gain.”

LPC Avocat Inc. said a Montreal man purchased two “Official Platinum” seats for Drake’s upcoming “It’s All A Blur” tour at the Bell Centre on July 14 for $789.54 each. The next day, the law firm says, Drake added a second show for July 15 and the same seats were available for more than $350 less.

“Ticketmaster unilaterally decides which tickets it advertises and sells as ‘Official Platinum’ based on a given event,” reads the application for the class action provided to the Star. “The result is that most, if not all, of the tickets advertised and sold as ‘Official Platinum’ are neither ‘premium tickets’ nor ‘some of the best seats in the house’ and are, in fact, just regular tickets sold by Ticketmaster at an artificially inflated premium in bad faith.”

The suit further alleges Ticketmaster knew Drake would perform two concerts in Montreal, but “concealed this information” in order to “squeeze out” as much money as possible from fans buying tickets for the first show.

If the Quebec Superior Court approves it, the class-action lawsuit will seek “compensatory damages in the aggregate amount of the difference between the prices charged for ‘Official Platinum’ tickets and what their regular price ought to have been” for fans who bought Official Platinum seats. It also seeks $300 per customer in punitive damages.

These allegations have not been proven in court and Ticketmaster has not publicly commented on them.

According to its website, LPC Avocat Inc. is “a class action law firm focusing on protecting consumer rights.”

Backlash for Ticketmaster prices

While fans have long groaned about high Ticketmaster prices, one world-famous musician recently took his grievances to Twitter.

The Cure frontman Robert Smith convinced the company this month to issue partial refunds to some of his fans after it had inflated prices of tickets that had originally been set as low as $20.

And after Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour Ticketmaster drop last November, which saw exorbitantly high ticket prices and left many fans without tickets of their own, Swifties made their frustrations known, eventually leading to a Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington looking into the ticket-vending giant’s dominance in the industry.

Some say Ticketmaster is a “monopolistic mess”

Ticketmaster is the world’s largest ticket seller, processing 500 million tickets each year in more than 30 countries. About 70 per cent of tickets for major concert venues in the U.S. are sold through Ticketmaster, according to data in a class-action lawsuit filed by consumers last year.

Some are suggesting the U.S. government split the company up, more than a decade after Ticketmaster and concert promoter Live Nation merged, with one senator calling the company a “monopolistic mess.”

According to the company during the judiciary hearings, bots attempting to buy and resell Swift’s tickets and a rush of fans led to a malfunction that crashed the site during presale.

Live Nation’s president and chief financial officer, Joe Berchtold, apologized for the incident and promised to improve service, saying the company has already spent $1 billion over the last decade on security enhancements.