Features

Book Excerpt: Ticket Masters (The String Cheese Incident vs.Ticketmaster)

A week later on September 11, two years to the day after the company was supposed to launch its wholly owned ticketing service, the band, along with Luba, SCI Ticketing’s Jason Mastrine and attorney Neil Glazer, held a press conference in New York.

Mastrine made it clear that, “We are not saying Ticketmaster doesn’t have a place in the ticketing business, but we have a different philosophy of doing business, one that caters directly to our fans.”

Luba’s comments were broader: “The music industry is suffering right now, but there is no reason that the artists and their fans have to go down with it,” he told the press. “We hope that the positive ramifications of filing this lawsuit will reach well beyond just the String Cheese Incident and their fans and benefit everyone.”

Ticketmaster responded to SCI Ticketing’s press conference with a press release the same day. “While it has been our company policy to not comment on pending litigation, SCI Ticketing has so distorted this issue in its public statements that we feel compelled to clarify the record,” it began. “Earlier this year a Federal Court dismissed a similar lawsuit brought against Ticketmaster. The claims that have been asserted by SCI Ticketing in this new lawsuit likewise lack merit and we are confident that they will also be dismissed after all the relevant facts are established.”

It went on to assert: “By demanding very large allocations of tickets, SCI has attempted to break valid contracts for its own self-promotion and monetary gain. … SCI and its ticketing company are trying to step in for a ‘free ride’ on the many benefits and services Ticketmaster provides its clients. SCI essentially wants to skim the best, most easily sold tickets and leave Ticketmaster and its clients with the job of selling the rest. … SCI’s unfair leveraging of its popularity to achieve its for-profit ticketing goals is both improper and illegal.”

Pleasants remembers the lawsuit being “a big deal for about seven days,” that it was nothing more than “a piece of noise that flared up.” Pleasants, the man responsible for turning Ticketmaster into a consumer-facing company, is surprisingly rigid in recalling his assessment of the situation. “String Cheese, if I remember correctly, was going into Ticketmaster’s buildings and were pulling fifty percent of their inventory and selling it to their fan club,” he says. “And if they were doing that, that is—in effect—illegal, full stop. There is no debate about whether it is illegal or not—it is illegal. Ticketmaster has a contract that is for exclusively selling every ticket in a particular building. If String Cheese wanted to sell half of their tickets through their website, they should go play in a park or some other place that is not with an exclusive contract with a ticketing company, with Ticketmaster or anybody else.” Simply put, he says, “There’s a thing called the law, and if I remember correctly, they were breaking it.”

***

Typically, Ticketmaster responded to lawsuits with a motion to dismiss that said, in effect, whatever laws they claim we’re violating, we’re not. However, in this instance, much to everyone’s surprise, Ticketmaster filed what’s called an “answer,” essentially a countersuit that systematically responded to each paragraph of SCI Ticketing’s lawsuit.

As the company noted, “Ticketmaster would prefer to resolve this matter outside of litigation, but now has no choice but to respond to the frivolous claims that have been asserted. Part of that response will be a countersuit by Ticketmaster against SCI Ticketing (and its founders) for intentionally interfering with contracts and relationships in which Ticketmaster has made great investments. The issue here is whether Ticketmaster and its clients have the right to contract for ticket distribution services or whether SCI Ticketing can free-ride on those relationships by exerting pressure on Ticketmaster’s clients to breach their contractual commitments.”

Glazer saw the countersuit as Ticketmaster “throwing down the gauntlet and saying, ‘Two can at play at that game.’” Whereas large corporations typically delay trials through requests to dismiss, this was different. “It indicated to me that we really had something that they were taking very seriously,” suggests Glazer. “What I took away was they didn’t necessarily want this to be a big public battle over big meaty questions of law.”