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

Mead’s charges stem from a case in which Mead and an associate at Ticketmaster illegally gained access to the systems of rival ticketing company, Crowdsurge. Mead and that accomplice – another former Ticketmaster executive named Zeeshan Zaidi – both pleaded guilty to a scheme that involved collecting and sharing confidential information with others in the Live Nation corporate family, information that was then used to poach Crowdsurge customers and bankrupt the company.

Zaidi pleaded guilty to a similar charge in 2019, but has not yet been sentenced.

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

READ MORE | Ticketmaster avoids hacking prosecution by paying $10 million fine |

While the Crowdsurge affair was not directly mentioned in the antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the incident certainly reflects the type of behavior that competitors have long alleged the company at the heart of the global entertainment industry is guilty of.

“Live Nation’s monopoly and the anticompetitive conduct that protects and perpetuates its monopoly strike a raw nerve, precisely because the industry at issue is one that has inspired, entertained, and challenged generations of Americans,” the DOJ’s complaint in that case reads. “Conduct that undermines competition here not only harms the fabric of the live music industry and the countless people who work in it, but also harms the foundation of creative expression and art that underpins our personal, social, and political lives.”

READ MORE | Live Nation and Ticketmaster Targeted in Landmark Antitrust Case

What Mead and Zaidi Admitted When They Were Still Ticketmaster Employees

Mead joined Ticketmaster subsidiary TicketWeb in 2013. Prior to that, he was Senior Vice President for Global Operations and General Manager of North America at Crowdsurge, a company that operated a music discovery platform and a separate ticketing division focused on allocating tickets to artist fan clubs for pre-sale.

Despite having signed a strict non-disclosure agreement with his former company (and Live Nation’s own agreement that he would not breach that agreement by sharing proprietary information as part of his hiring process), less than a month after his hire, Ticketmaster executives asked him to share information about his former company’s strengths and weaknesses and areas in which they could be exploited.

“During (communications about information Mead had obtained while working at Crowdsurge), Executive-2 described how the goal was to “strangle (Victim Company)” and “steal back one of (Victim Company)’s key clients,” the complaint reads in part. “MEAD responded by offering that they could “bring (Victim Company) to its knees” if they could win back pre-sales of tickets for a second major artist by offering the same ticket pricing structure Victim Company gave the second artist.”

Shortly thereafter, Mead and others within Ticketmaster began gaining direct access to Crowdsurge’s systems, sharing their own insights into the company’s operations and cost structures with an expanding circle of top-level company officials, including then-Ticketmaster President Jared Smith and Michael Rapino, then and now CEO of Live Nation Entertainment. Within months, both Zaidi and Mead received promotions and pay raises.

The scheme began to unravel in 2014 when one of the Live Nation executives who had knowledge of the illegal intrusion resigned and subsequently joined Crowdsurge, which merged with Songkick in 2015. Passwords known to Mead and shared with Zaidi and Ticketmaster/Live Nation management began to change, and a civil complaint alleging antitrust violations was filed in 2015, later amended to include allegations relating to illegal system access as part of that illegal conduct. By 2017, documents detailing the illegal system access by Mead and Zaidi were made public as part of that lawsuit, and both were fired.

Live Nation later settled that lawsuit by purchasing the remaining Songkick/Crowdsurge assets (the music discovery business had previously been sold to Warner Music Group) for $100 million in 2018 and ending the lawsuit. It only cost an additional $10 million in fees to wrap up the entire legal matter three years later — until this latest wrinkle.

“Ticketmaster employees repeatedly – ​​and illegally – gained unauthorized access to a competitor’s computers using stolen passwords to unlawfully gather proprietary information,” Acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme said in a press release announcing the 2021 settlement of criminal charges against Ticketmaster.

“When employees leave one company and enter another, it is illegal to take company information with them. Ticketmaster used stolen information to gain a competitive advantage and then promoted employees who broke the law. This investigation is a perfect example of why these laws exist: to protect consumers from being scammed in what should be a fair marketplace,” added FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney.