Songkick accuses Live Nation & Ticketmaster of hacking trade secrets

Songkick's lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster (alleging antitrust violations, anticompetitive behavior and intentional interference) seems to have entered a new phase.

Indeed, in an amended complaint filed in U.S. District Court in California, Songkick is now alleging that a former CrowdSurge executive - and current Ticketmaster employee - Stephen Mead, hacked into CrowdSurge's computers, stealing trade secrets and confidential information, which he later passed on to Ticketmaster, in order to improve the ticketing giant's Artist Services division.

Now Songkick claims Mead resigned from CrowdSurge in July 2012 and walked out with as many as 85,000 documents, including "a suite of proprietary service offerings; financial information, such as ticket sales, merchandise revenues, quarterly profitability, and forecasts of various kinds; cost and pricing data; customer information; and other non-public information of economic value". Less than a year after leaving CrowdSurge and signing a non-disclosure separation agreement, the complaint reads, Mead joined Ticketmaster-owned TicketWeb, then joined Ticketmaster's artist services division, where he used that data to create "a clone of CrowdSurge called Ticketmaster OnTour".

According to Songkick, the data breach didn't end there; the filing goes on to say that Ticketmaster SVP Zeeshan Zaidi, who runs the artist dervices division, and others within the company pushed Mead to "use his knowledge of CrowdSurge’s internal systems to improperly access those systems for purposes of monitoring CrowdSurge’s potential and actual artist-clients, staying abreast of what CrowdSurge was doing and, ultimately, to 'cut [CrowdSurge] off at the knees'".

Songkick further alleges that the information Mead obtained was then presented to the Live Nation hierarchy, including Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino and Ticketmaster president of North America Jared Smith.

According to the complaint, the hacking of CrowdSurge's system continued in some form from November 2013 through 2015.

Live Nation answered via a statement provided to "Billboard":

In late 2015, Songkick elected to file a baseless antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster. Since then, the case has gone poorly for Songkick. It sought a preliminary injunction and lost, with the Court concluding that Songkick’s complaint 'failed to show virtually any likelihood of success on the merits.' And the Court granted in full Defendants’ motion to dismiss a significant swath of Songkick’s antitrust claims concluding that 'there is no plausible argument' supporting the baseless position Songkick adopted. In the face of those adverse rulings, Songkick has been forced to conjure up a new set of dubious arguments and theories, resulting in the amended complaint they recently filed. Songkick’s amended complaint is based on the alleged misappropriation of information that Songkick did not even try to keep secret, in some cases could not have kept secret, and in some cases shared with artist managers that work for Live Nation. The claims have no legal merit and Live Nation and Ticketmaster will continue to vigorously defend this case.