… this one from the Springsteen ticket imbroglio, for “conspiracy to monopolize.” Bloomberg reports:

Ticketmaster was sued for redirecting fans, including those trying to buy Springsteen tickets Feb. 2, to TicketsNow.com where the tickets were marked up by hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Ticketmaster gets a 15 percent cut from TicketsNow, which it owns, Paul Kiesel, lawyer for the plaintiff, said in the complaint filed Feb. 6 in Los Angeles federal court.

“Ticketmaster profits twice as the result of the monopolistic scheme,” Kiesel, of Kiesel, Boucher & Larson LLP, said in the complaint, which seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction to stop the practice. “Defendants have illegally bilked event ticket purchasers out of millions of dollars.”

Thanks to Todd Levy for the heads up. Levy’s been blogging about the merger here. Pretty far down he makes a point about the Springsteen dustup I haven’t seen elsewhere:

Just a little sidebar here since it’s been bugging me a little. Most of these articles keep saying that Ticketmaster was “redirecting” people to Tickets Now. Well that may be semantically correct, but from a technical standpoint that’s not really the case. What Ticketmaster did was prominently merchandise Tickets Now on their “sorry, we’re sold out” page. They didn’t automatically send you to a Tickets Now page (i.e. redirect you in a technical sense). You had to take action, clicking a link which would then take you to the inventory page on Tickets Now. Not sure if this subtle nuance impacts the case, but the talking point seems to be that they “redirected you“ when in actuality they just used a well designed banana to get you, the chimpanzee, to get yourself from one side of the lab to the other.

Emphasis added. That issue may or may not come up if the case actually ever gets adjudicated. A separate issue is whether folks were getting offered the scalped tix while unscalped ones were still available. I haven’t the faintest idea if there’s any exposure at all in either case.

My feeling has always been that artists and promoters should charge whatever they want for concerts, the public can choose to pay it, and critics on the sidelines like me should assiduously point out who the greedheads are and how much money they are making. (And that too many music journalists take a pass on such coverage.)

Ticketmaster is a different story. My impression is that what that company does should be illegal but isn’t. A secondary issue is that there is even less coverage of how the company does business. The simple solution to the whole problem is that shows should be advertised with complete prices that include all the ticket or parking fees.

(If some of them are optional or fungible the promoters can include some small print that for once indicates prices might be less than advertised.) That would encourage promoters to get their tickets sold as cheaply as possible.

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Previously in Hitsville:
Constantly updated: The Ticketmaster-Live-Nation unholy-matrimony news round-up!
Five arguments against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger
Irving Azoff kicks it old school
The music industry’s Putin
Bad merger coverage
WWBD (What would Bono do?)
Billboard’s analysis of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger
Springsteen and Landau bash Ticketmaster and Live Nation!
P.S. on Ticketmaster: A case study, starring Bruce Springsteen
Why the potential Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a very bad idea
Is Ticketmaster trying to muddle the fees issue?
The Azoff-Ticketmaster deal: Bad news for concert-goers—and the music industry
Why you so seldom read about obscene Ticketmaster-style ticketing charges