Employees at Center of SongKick Lawsuit No Longer at Ticketmaster

A new wrinkle emerged in the litigation between Songkick and Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation this week.

Multiple reports confirmed that Stephen Mead and Zeeshan Zaidi no longer work for the ticketing giant, leaving not long after Songkick filed a motion to complain that some 4,000 new documents were dumped for their review after a deadline had passed – an omission that lawyers explained as an oversight.

According to CompleteMusicUpdate.com Mead worked for CrowdSurge before joining Ticketweb in 2013 and moving to its parent Ticketmaster in 2015 as Director of Client Relations & Artist Services. Songkick’s suit alleges that he retained a substantial amount of company documents from Crowdsurge, which was acquired by Songkick in 2015, and used that information to develop business plans to counter his former employer’s attempts to compete with his new home.

The core of Songkick’s complaint is that Live Nation held the numerous acts it holds contracts with as “ransom,” making it near-impossible for competitors such as Songkick to operate in the ticketing world against Ticketmaster.

Live Nation has called the allegations that Mead and Zaidi used confidential documents against their former employers “baseless.”

Dave Brooks has a great deal more background on the story at Amplify – which we’ll avoid quoting extensively out of respect to their paywall. But according to the Billboard and Amplify editor,

All we know is that whatever is detailed in the Sept. 11 document dump allegedly shows further proof about the hacking claim and potentially entangles other individuals at Ticketmaster. Less than a month after the doc dump, Zaidi and Mead are out at the company, officials with Ticketmaster have confirmed.

Songkick has already jettisoned most of its operation, as its sharing app was sold off to WMG earlier this year. The trial is set to begin next month.