Former Ticketmaster executive Stephen Mead pleads guilty in hacking scandal

Mead has a sentencing hearing in September

Ticketmaster is in the news again, this time over the Crowdsurge/Songkick hacking case. This week, former Ticketmaster executive Stephen Mead pleaded guilty in a New York court to one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The charge to which Mead pleaded guilty is one of several the former executive faces in the 2021 case.

The charges that make up this case involve Mead and another Ticketmaster employee. Both are accused of illegally accessing the servers of a rival ticketing company: Crowdsurge, which later merged with Songkick. The scheme involved them using the access to gather confidential information and sharing it with other members of Live Nation’s corporate family. This information was used to steal customers from Crowdsurge, which later went into insolvency. Both Stephen Mead and his colleague Zeeshan Zaidi pleaded guilty in the case.

According to specialised sources, Zaidi, Ticketmaster’s other former executive, pleaded guilty to fraud charges in 2019. Ticketmaster itself entered into a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in New York to avoid prosecution, a deal valued at $10 million. Nevertheless, the case against Mead continued.

According to law360.com, which first reported developments in the case, Mead has agreed to pay a settlement of $67,970. Although no further details are available about the plea agreement itself, it is known that the sentencing hearing is expected to take place in September.

The lawsuit

The lawsuit, announced by the Attorney General Merrick Garland of the Department of Justice stats that “Live Nation’s monopoly, and the anticompetitive conduct that protects and maintains its monopoly, strikes a chord precisely because the industry at stake is one that has for generations inspired, entertained, and challenged Americans (…) Conduct that subverts competition here not only harms the structure of the live music industry and the countless people that work in that industry, but also damages the foundation of creative expression and art that lies at the heart of our personal, social, and political lives.“