Ticketmaster is an American ticket sales and distribution company based in Beverly Hills, California. Through its website, the company sells tickets to many countries around the world, with clients that include venues, artists and promoters.
Through Ticketmaster, clients can control their events and set ticket prices, and Ticketmaster will then sell the tickets that the clients make available to them, to the general public
In December 2020, the company "entered into a plea agreement with federal prosecutors" and agreed to pay a $10 million fine after being charged with illegally accessing computer systems of CrowdSurge (Songkick), its competitor.
Following the accusation, Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation admitted to hiring Stephen Mead, a former employee of its rival in 2013.
Then, now-fired Ticketmaster executive Zeeshan Zaidi and other in the executives in the company encouraged him to turn over his old employer’s secrets. That included logging into web pages that have analytics for artist management companies, and to also get a better understandings into CrowdSurge’s operations.
Since CrowdSurge used non-protected but difficult-to-find preview links for its ticketing pages, Ticketmaster created a long spreadsheet of every ticketing page it could find, in order to identify clients of CrowdSurge and hoped to “dissuade” them.
Ticketmaster executive was said that the goal of this was to “choke off” CrowdSurge, and "steal back" one of CrowdSurge's signature clients.” The co-conspirator then offered that Ticketmaster could cut CrowdSurge "off at the knees” if they could win back presale ticketing business for a second major artist that was a client of the victim company.
"Ticketmaster used stolen information to gain an advantage over its competition, and then promoted the employees who broke the law," said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Williams Sweeney,
“Ticketmaster employees repeatedly — and illegally — accessed a competitor’s computers without authorization using stolen passwords to unlawfully collect business intelligence,” added acting U.S. attorney Seth DuCharme.
“Further, Ticketmaster’s employees brazenly held a division-wide ‘summit’ at which the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company’s computers, as if that were an appropriate business tactic. Today’s resolution demonstrates that any company that obtains a competitor’s confidential information for commercial advantage, without authority or permission, should expect to be held accountable in federal court.”
In a post on American Association for Justice's website:
The hacking allegations were first reported in 2017. At that time, CrowdSurge sued Live Nation for antitrust violations.
Ticketmaster said that it lost access to the CrowdSurge's system by 2015, the same year CrowdSurge merged with Songkick.
Following the case, Ticketmaster expressed its satisfaction with the outcome.
“Ticketmaster terminated both Zaidi and Mead in 2017, after their conduct came to light. Their actions violated our corporate policies and were inconsistent with our values. We are pleased that this matter is now resolved,” the company said in a statement.
