Ticketmaster Agrees to Settlement; Does the Fix Fit?

Like many concert goers, I recently received an email from Ticketmaster suggesting there might be some reduced-price concert tickets in my future.

Now some publications are suggesting ticketing giant is addressing a lawsuit alleging astronomical amounts of excessive user fees with, essentially lip service in the shape of tickets.

In response to a lawsuit, Schlesinger v. Ticketmaster, dating back to 2003, Ticketmaster is accused of charging unfair fees for processing and shipping of concert tickets. Anyone who bought a ticket from Ticketmaster between October 21, 1999 and February 27, 2013, “you will be eligible to receive a code good for $2.25 on a future ticket purchase,” according to Hypebot. “If you purchased multiple tickets in that time frame, you’ll be eligible for multiple codes, one for each covered transaction, up to a limit of 17. If you had UPS deliver a ticket from Ticketmaster during the class period, you will be eligible for one discount code per transaction that will take $5.00 off a future charge.”

There are, of course, caveats. To find out whether you’ve made any eligible purchases, you have to log in to your Ticketmaster account first. Any vouchers are good through June 18, 2020.

The San Diego Tribune has a warning message for anyone thinking of using the vouchers: It’s too little, too late.

“The case had a good cause: punishing Ticketmaster for its awful assertion that hefty fees on tickets for sports and entertainment events were necessary to actually provide services, not just to pad the company’s profit, the newspaper says. “But instead of giving back money to the millions of people scammed by Ticketmaster, the settlement gives most victims up to 17 coupons worth $2.26 to use in new purchases from Ticketmaster—with two coupons the maximum per transaction.

“Given the new competition that Ticketmaster faces in ticket sales, this is no penalty,” the paper continues. “It’s a marketing opportunity, a new scam on top of the old one.”

It’s worth noting, of course, that even some of Ticketmaster’s competitors have been facing their own legal challenges. Some smaller resellers, including Flying Falco Entertainment and TicketToad, have to pay New York State just under $3 million for the use of illegal programs and bots to buy concert tickets in bulk in response to legal action coming from Eric Schneiderman, the state’s attorney general.