Two Ticketmaster employees named in Songkick’s lawsuit against Live Nation – Stephen Mead and Zeeshan Zaidi – have left the firm, according to Billboard magazine.
Songkick’s legal action against Ticketmaster is set to go to trial in November. The exact circumstances behind the pair’s departures have not been disclosed.
Prior to his role as director of client relations and artist services with Ticketmaster, Mead worked for CrowdSurge, which was acquired by Songkick in 2015. The accusing firm claims that Mead retained 85,000 Crowdsurge company documents, including business plans, financial information, contracts and more to create reports about potential new business after his departure to Ticketmaster.
In addition, Songkick alleges that Mead accessed test sites created for potential new Crowdsurge clients, which were only publicly available to those that knew how the URLs were formulated.
Songkick first filed a lawsuit in 2015 when it accused Ticketmaster and Live Nation of anticompetitive acts. Papers filed said that artists who had used the ticketing platform in the past had seen their Ticketmaster featured pages abruptly removed.
However, in February, Songkick submitted new claims that staff at Ticketmaster stole trade secrets from the start-up and used them to develop its own rival service.
Songkicks’s primary allegation is that Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, was holding its acts to ransom, primarily in the US, if they chose to collaborate with Songkick on fan club pre-sales.
Despite this, Live Nation said the additional allegations were “baseless,” while Songkick has submitted emails from Mead about accessing the Crowdsurge system.
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