A federal appeals court has thrown out a class-action antitrust suit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster on the grounds that buyers forfeited their rights to sue by agreeing to the Terms of Use.
According to Billboard, the 24-page ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that customers can only file suit against the ticketing giant in private arbitration, rather than in open court. Originally filed in 2020, the lawsuit was denied by a lower federal court in 2021 before reaching the Ninth Circuit on appeal.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs—which includes “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of customers—challenged the validity of the user agreement, alleging it was unscrupulously hidden from online customers. A three-judge panel shot down that assertion on Monday.
“At three independent stages—when creating an account, signing into an account, and completing a purchase—Ticketmaster and Live Nation webpage users are presented with a confirmation button above which text informs the user that, by clicking on this button, ‘you agree to our Terms of Use,’” Judge Danny J. Boggs wrote on behalf of the panel. “A reasonable user would have seen the notice and been able to locate the terms via hyperlink.”
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The original 2020 suit called Live Nation Entertainment—formed in 2010 via a congressionally-approved merger of Live Nation Inc. and Ticketmaster—a “monster” that “must be stopped.” The complaint alleged that the ticketing monolith’s “anticompetitive scheme has been wildly successful and today threatens to put nearly all ticketing services for major concert venues (primary and secondary) in the United States under Ticketmaster’s monopolistic thumb.”
The attorneys from the law firm Quinn Emmanuel who filed this rejected antitrust suit have a second, similarly worded suit pending in a lower court.
This development comes at a time of increased scrutiny for Live Nation and Ticketmaster. In the wake of a disastrous rollout for tickets to Taylor Swift‘s The Eras Tour which left millions of fans ticketless and angry, criticizing the ticketing giant has become a bipartisan rallying cry. Shortly after nearly 15 million users crashed the Ticketmaster website during the Taylor Swift pre-sale, the United States Department of Justice revealed its own antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment which is still ongoing.
Read the full opinion from Judge Boggs here.