SCI vs Ticketmaster
The String Cheese Incident picks up the flag where Pearl Jam left and does battle with the mighty Ticketmaster colossus.
But the suit filed by SCI Ticketing alleges that an arrangement between Ticketmaster and another online ticketing service, Musictoday, shows that Ticketmaster wants to control any artist-to-fan ticketing it does allow. In the deal, worked out last year, Musictoday promised not to sue Ticketmaster for antitrust violations--as they had threatened to do when the May 2002 letters came out. In return, Ticketmaster agreed to tolerate excessive holdbacks--up to half the house for Musictoday's biggest clients, the Dave Matthews Band, Phish, and the Dead. String Cheese claims that Musictoday and Ticketmaster have colluded to cut others out of the ticketing business. And according to Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, the deal may prove fateful, much as Microsoft's bundling arrangements did in its antitrust trials: "In the same sense, here you have a monopolist apparently using its monopoly power to discriminate among people that have to do business with it, and giving favors to those who play the game, which is to reduce competition."
