In a bipartisan response to Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift ticket sale fiasco, Sens. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D.Minn.) & Mike Lee (R. Utah) announced Tuesday that they were announcing a ticket sale fiasco. Senate A hearing will be held by the subcommittee to assess the level of competition in ticketing.
The hearing, though not yet scheduled, will take places before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee for Competition Policy and Antitrust is headed by Klobuchar and Lee serves as a ranking Member. This announcement comes a week after Ticketmaster was criticized for bungling a highly anticipated ticket sale. Swift’s upcoming stadium tour.
“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets,” Klobuchar declared in a statement. “The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve.”
Lee said more “American consumers deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues,” Observed the importance of supporting “an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
Ticketmaster made a statement in response to the announcement of the hearing. “has a significant share of the primary ticketing services market because of the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system.”
Much of the criticism directed at Ticketmaster in the last week was focused on the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010. This resulted to the company taking control of an estimated 70% of the ticketing industry. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), was one of the first to raise the issue during the Swift ticket sale frenzy last Tuesday, tweeting: “Ticketmaster is a monopoly, [its] merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be [reined] in. Break them up.”
Critics say the company’s apparent monopoly allowed it to get away with providing a subpar service rife with technical glitches that proved unable to meet customer demand. Many people frustrated by last week’s ticket-buying ordeal emphasized that Ticketmaster had approved a set number of customers to access Tuesday’s sale, and thus should have been adequately prepared to meet what it later called a “historically unprecedented demand.”
Many of these customers were instead met with error messages and long wait times as they attempted to purchase tickets. Fans who couldn’t get through on Tuesday were let down again when Ticketmaster outright canceled its scheduled sale of more tickets later in the week.
SwiftOne of the most beloved recording artists of all times,, finally spoke out about the situation, telling fans that she was also disappointed in Ticketmaster.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” She spoke highly about the company. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
