Former Ticketmaster manager sentenced after hacker attack on competitors

Former Ticketmaster executive Stephen Mead was sentenced this week after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusion earlier this year. Mead, a British citizen, was fined $67,970 and sentenced to one year of probation.

Mead’s charges stem from a case in which Mead and another Ticketmaster employee illegally accessed the systems of a rival ticketing company – Crowdsurge. Mead and his co-conspirator – another former Ticketmaster executive named Zeeshan Zaidi – have both admitted guilt in a plot that involved collecting confidential information and sharing it with other members of the Live Nation family of companies. That information was then used to poach Crowdsurge customers and drive the company out of business.

Zaidi had previously pleaded guilty to a similar charge in 2019 but has not yet been convicted.

Ticketmaster itself reached a settlement with federal prosecutors in New York in 2020, paying a $10 million fine to avoid prosecution. The Justice Department told the BBC that it had met the terms of deferred prosecution from July 2024.

FURTHER LITERATURE | Ticketmaster avoids prosecution for hacking attacks by paying $10 million fine |

While the Crowdsurge affair was not directly mentioned in the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster filed earlier this year, the incident undoubtedly reflects the type of behavior that competitors have long accused the corporate giant at the center of the global entertainment industry of.

“Live Nation’s monopoly and the anticompetitive conduct that protects and maintains that monopoly strike a nerve precisely because it involves an industry that has inspired, entertained, and challenged Americans for generations,” the Justice Department’s complaint in the case states. “Here, conduct that undermines competition not only harms the fabric of the live music industry and the countless people who work in that industry, but also damages the foundation of creative expression and the arts that lie at the heart of our personal, social, and political lives.”

FURTHER LITERATURE | Live Nation and Ticketmaster targeted in groundbreaking antitrust lawsuit

What Mead and Zaidi admitted as employees of Ticketmaster

Mead joined TicketWeb, a subsidiary of Ticketmaster, in 2013 after previously serving as senior vice president of global operations and general manager of North America at Crowdsurge, a company that operated a music discovery platform and a separate ticketing operation aimed at allocating pre-sale tickets to artists’ fan clubs.

Although he had signed a strict nondisclosure agreement with his previous company (and Live Nation also included an agreement that he would not violate that agreement by disclosing proprietary information as part of the hiring process), less than a month into his job, Ticketmaster executives began asking him to disclose information about his previous company’s strengths and weaknesses, and areas where they could be exploited.

“During (the communication regarding information Mead had received while working at Crowdsurge), Executive-2 described that the goal was to ‘strangle’ (Victim Company) and ‘steal back one of (Victim Company’s) most important customers,'” the indictment states. “MEAD responded by offering that they could ‘bring (Victim Company) to its knees’ if they could win back the pre-sale ticket business for a second major artist by offering the same ticket pricing structure that Victim Company was providing to the second artist.”

Soon after, Mead and other Ticketmaster employees were given direct access to Crowdsurge’s systems and were able to share confidential insights into the company’s operations and fee structures with an ever-expanding circle of top-level executives – including then-Ticketmaster president Jared Smith and Michael Rapino, who was then and remains CEO of Live Nation Entertainment. Within months, both Zaidi and Mead were receiving promotions and raises.

The system began to crumble in 2014 when one of the Live Nation executives who was privy to the illegal intrusion quit and subsequently moved to Crowdsurge, which merged with Songkick in 2015. Passwords that Mead knew and shared with Zaidi and Ticketmaster/Live Nation management began to change, and in 2015 a civil lawsuit was filed alleging antitrust violations, later amended to include allegations of illegal access to the system as part of this illegal conduct. By 2017, documents detailing Mead and Zaidi’s illegal access to the system were released as part of that lawsuit, and both were fired.

Live Nation later settled the litigation by purchasing the remaining assets of Songkick/Crowdsurge (the music discovery business had previously been sold to Warner Music Group) for $100 million in 2018, ending the litigation. Three years later, it only cost an additional $10 million in fees to settle the entire litigation—until this latest twist.

“Ticketmaster employees repeatedly – and illegally – accessed a competitor’s computers without authorization, using stolen passwords to improperly collect business information,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme in a press release announcing the settlement of the criminal charges against Ticketmaster in 2021.

“When employees leave one company and move to another, it is illegal to take confidential information with them. Ticketmaster used stolen information to gain an advantage over the competition and then promoted the employees who broke the law. This investigation is a perfect example of why these laws exist – to protect consumers from fraud in what is supposed to be a fair marketplace,” added FBI Assistant Director Sweeney.