Senators to scrutinize Ticketmaster over Taylor Swift website outages
Virginia Aabram
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The Senate Judiciary Committee will arrange a hearing to investigate the practices of the ticketing industry after Ticketmaster crashed amid historic demand for Taylor Swift tickets.
Called “That’s The Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” it will be held at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Ticketmaster, which is the only ticket retailer for the majority of stadiums in the United States, was unable to keep up with fans’ demand for tickets to Swift’s “Eras Tour” last year.
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“The issues within America’s ticketing industry were made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase tickets for Taylor Swift’s new tour, but these problems are not new,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the head of the Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights. “For too long, consumers have faced high fees, long waits, and website failures, and Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company faces inadequate pressure to innovate and improve.”
Her statement continued: “At next week’s hearing, we will examine how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industries harms customers and artists alike. Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”
The subcommittee’s ranking member, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), added that he wants the hearing to help ensure competition keeps all manner of industries working for the benefit of consumers and “that anticompetitive mergers and exclusionary conduct are not crippling an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
After the Swift ticket troubles in November, a New York Times report revealed that the Department of Justice has been investigating Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment.
Ticketmaster’s website glitched during a presale for verified fans under unprecedented traffic, leading the retailer to cancel the general ticket sale. The response from disappointed fans led to thousands of letters to the DOJ calling for an investigation into the company. Lawmakers said the incident should prompt a look at competition in the ticketing industry.
The website attributed the problem to more demand than it could handle, as well as bot attacks.
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“Historically, we’ve been able to manage huge volume coming into the site to shop for tickets, so those with Verified Fan codes have a smooth shopping process. However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak,” Ticketmaster said in a statement.
(Disclosure: The Washington Examiner is owned by the Anschutz Corporation, a firm that also owns the Anschutz Entertainment Group, a competitor of Ticketmaster.)