A law firm in Montreal hopes to launch a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster, which it claims “intentionally misleads consumers for their own financial gain.”
LPC Avocat Inc. said a Montreal man purchased a pair of Official Platinum tickets to Drake’s It’s All A Blur Tour concert at the Bell Centre on July 14 for $789.54 each. The following day, a second Drake show was added on July 15 – and the same two seats were available for $427.06 each.
The lawyers said the “Platinum” tickets were for seats in the upper bowl, according to the Montreal Gazette.
“Ticketmaster unilaterally decides which tickets it advertises and sells as ‘Official Platinum’ based on a given event,” reads the complaint. “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, in fact, just regular tickets sold by Ticketmaster at an artificially inflated premium in bad faith.”
LPC Avocat Inc. also alleged that Ticketmaster knew Drake would do two concerts in Montreal when it made tickets made available for the first one and “concealed this information (i.e., the existence of the second concert) 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.”
If approved by Quebec Superior Court, the class-action lawsuit will seek “compensatory damages in the aggregate amount of the difference between the prices charged for ‘Official Platinum’ tickets and what their regular price ought to have been” for each fan who bought “Official Platinum” tickets as well as $300 per customers in punitive damages.
Ticketmaster has not commented on the allegations.
On its website, LPC Avocat Inc. describes itself as “a class action law firm focusing on protecting consumer rights.”
Last October, the firm said it reached a settlement with Ticketmaster in a class-action that alleged the company contravened the Quebec Consumer Protection Act in the way it “disclosed the Original Ticket Price of tickets offered for resale on its website or mobile application.” (Ticketmaster denied the allegation.)
Quebec consumers who bought a resale ticket between June 2018 and May 2022 were to receive a $10 Ticketmaster credit on a future purchase.