MONTREAL, CA (CelebrityAccess) – A Canadian law firm has filed a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster (TM), owned by entertainment giant Live Nation (LN), over pricing for Drake’s upcoming It’s All A Blur tour with 21 Savage.
LPC Avocat Inc. has filed the suit after a Montreal man, described as a “huge fan of Drake,” purchased two “Official Platinum” seats for the tour’s July 14 stop at the Bell Centre in Montreal for $789.54 each. The next day, the suit claims that Drake added a second show for July 15, which had the same seats 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 class action application provided to the Toronto 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 just regular tickets sold by Ticketmaster at an artificially inflated premium in bad faith.”
The class-action application, filed in Laval, Quebec, says TM advertised the official platinum tickets as “some of the best seats in the house.” Still, the application says the seats secured by the Plaintiff were in the upper deck – about 13 rows from the very top of the arena.
“I think it is illegal to advertise as some of the best seats in the house, tickets that are in fact some of the worst seats in the house and … charge a premium compared to other seats,” lawyer Joey Zukran with LPC said in an interview.
According to the Star, the lawsuit states that “Ticketmaster was very well aware that Drake — one of the most famous singers in the world today — would be performing two concerts in Montreal when it initially released tickets for the first concert, but concealed this information from the public in order to squeeze out as much money as possible from real fans who lined up (virtually) to purchase tickets for the first show.”
The class action wants an injunction to stop TM from branding tickets as official platinum when they’re not the best seats in the house and for each member of the potential class action to be refunded for the price difference and paid $350 each in damages.
“The legal claim is based on the Consumer Protection Act of Quebec and the Competition Act, which applies nationally. So we could potentially have a national class, but that’s a debate for the court,” Zukran said.
It’s unclear how many people could be included in the class action, Zukran said.
As with the Taylor Swift ticketing disaster and fans crying foul over the Bruce Springsteen ticket sales, this is just another in a laundry list of complaints about the ticketing platform’s ticket price practices. CelebrityAccess reported on the Drake presale and complaints afterward, which you can read HERE.
