Lyte Faces Multiple Lawsuits from Festival Organizers Over Alleged Breach of Contract, Fraud, and Missing Payments
DJ Excision, the founder of music festival Lost Lands, the organizer of which is now suing ticketing platform Lyte for breach of contract and more. Photo Credit: Live Nation/Terrence Blanton
Seemingly shuttered ticketing platform Lyte is now grappling with multiple lawsuits filed by festival organizers who say they’re owed sizable sums following the company’s abrupt shutdown.
Lost Lands organizer Apex Event Management and the team behind North Coast Music Festival just recently fired off those complaints, amid continued operational woes for Lyte. We first covered the ticketing platform’s apparent issues last week, after its website was taken down for purported maintenance.
This maintenance process is still underway – as is a rapid-fire selloff of the assets owned by Lyte, which has parted with its founder and reportedly laid off its team to boot. Evidently without the resources to continue operating, the well-funded business looks set to find a new owner sometime next month.
Closer to the present, though, the unexpected turn of events has left multiple festivals and ticket sellers in a decidedly difficult spot. With Lyte completely offline, several happenings have lost access to their primary and/or secondary ticket sales as well as the resulting revenue.
Also on the resale front, a number of ticked-off Reddit users are claiming that they’re owed payments for transactions carried out via Lyte pre-shutdown. Running with the point, Billboard has described in more words Lyte’s alleged business practice of receiving VIP tickets directly from organizers, marking up the prices, and then cutting in said organizers on the inflated proceeds.
While time should reveal additional details about that arrangement – which isn’t surprising given the potential for event passes to fetch sizable sums – it’s worth keeping in mind when it comes to the initially highlighted lawsuits.
(Regarding those additional details, days after this piece was published, Billboard updated its original coverage “to more accurately describe NCMF’s lawsuit against Lyte.” North Coast Music Festival, the edited piece clarified, had actually been selling passes on Lyte “below their original check out price.” We then covered the update, pushback against similar scalping allegations from Lost Lands, and more about the ongoing Lyte meltdown on Friday, September 27th.)
To be sure, a substantial portion of the action from Excision’s Lost Lands has been redacted pending a formal application to seal. Nevertheless, the available details tell us quite a bit about the positioning of Lyte-partnered festivals.
According to the legal text, Lost Lands 2024 kicked off on September 17th – or shortly after Lyte, its “exclusive seller of secondary market tickets,” appeared to go belly up.
In “essentially shutting down the secondary ticket market” for the event, per the breach of contract and fraud suit, the defendant allegedly inflicted “untold damage” on the organizer and on the “many thousands of consumers who” were using the service to buy, sell, and/or access passes.
Whatever the precise terms of its Lyte agreement, Lost Lands says it ceased receiving the contractually outlined payments in August. That refers specifically to $79,773.81 due as of August 21st, $330,917.07 due as of September 4th, and an estimated total of over $600,000 due with the festival’s latest installment now in the books.
Apex/Lost Lands is further seeking interest on the sum, damages, and an order preventing the sale-minded defendant “from transferring assets that may be used to satisfy any judgment.”
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