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Good: Ticketmaster has to pay up for being sneaky AF about their bullshit fees [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2025-01-30

After six years of legal wrangling, someone finally managed to make Ticketmaster accountable for their infamous price-gouging practices. A Canadian lawyer just won a $6 million settlement over the company's notorious "drip pricing" strategy, reports CTV News.

Sure, everyone understands a ticketing company needs to earn a reasonable fee for connecting fans with events. But Ticketmaster has morphed from helpful middleman into the entertainment industry's toll-collecting troll under the bridge, extracting whatever fees they want because, really, where else are you gonna go?

Regina lawyer Tony Merchant led the charge against the ticket-selling behemoth's practice of surprising customers with an endless parade of add-on fees. "It unfairly tricked people into paying more money for really the same thing," Merchant told CTV News. (In late-stage capitalist countries, companies are supposed to be fair about tricking people.)

Ticketmaster did the classic corporate two-step of denying any wrongdoing while simultaneously agreeing to pay millions to make it all go away. The settlement will dish out $45 credits to Canadians who bought tickets during the first half of 2018.

The lawyers are getting $1.7 million, which seems fair considering they spent six years of their lives pursuing this case while Ticketmaster's lawyers probably tried to add processing fees to their legal documents.

Previously:

• We already know Ticketmaster is a rip-off, John Oliver explains just how terrible it is

• Ex-Ticketmaster CEO blames vinyl album lengths on TikTok

• Ticketmaster stung by undercover journalists, who reveal that the company deliberately enables scalpers and rips off artists

• Justice Department sues Livenation over Ticketmaster monopoly abuses

• Proposed redesign of Ticketmaster's ugly and confusing tickets

• Ticketmaster gets $500 million from Mohammad bin Salman

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