By Stephen Johns

Ticketmaster’s shady relationship with the secondary ticketing market is back in the news, with a half-billion dollar lawsuit filed in Toronto accusing the company of scalping its own tickets. The lawsuit follows hot on the heels of last week’s ticket sales for a string of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band concerts across the United States and Canada: after Ticketmaster told customers it had sold out of tickets, those customers were redirected to TicketsNow—”a Ticketmaster company”—and encouraged to fork over hundreds of extra dollars on tickets that were never available for regular sale. (U.S. Congress threatened an investigation, while TicketsNow quickly announced it’d no longer sell tickets before an event’s actual on-sale date.) The case could set a precedent for how tickets are bought and sold across Canada, and it’ll be fascinating to see how it plays out.