© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Singer Taylor Swift arrives to speak at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, September 9, 2022. REUTERS/Mark Blinch/File Photo
By David Sheparson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate committee will hold a hearing on January 24 on the lack of competition in the ticketing industry following Ticketmaster’s problems managing Taylor Swift concert ticket sales.
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is titled “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment.” The committee did not reveal the witnesses.
In November, Ticketmaster canceled a planned general public ticket sale for Swift’s “Eras” tour, her first in five years, after more than 3.5 billion requests from fans, bots and scalpers overwhelmed its website.
“The problems within the US ticketing industry became painfully obvious when the Ticketmaster 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, who heads an antitrust subcommittee.
“We will examine how consolidation in the ticketing and live entertainment industries hurts both patrons and performers.”
Klobuchar and two other lawmakers argued in November that Ticketmaster and owner Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE:) should be separated by the Justice Department if any misconduct is found in an ongoing investigation.
Ticketmaster, which antitrust experts say controls more than 70% of the market share of major ticketing services for major US concert venues, did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on Tuesday night.
In November, the company denied any anticompetitive practices and said it remained under a consent decree with the Justice Department following its 2010 merger with Live Nation, adding that there was “no evidence of systemic consent decree violations.”
Consent decrees are often used to prohibit potentially anti-competitive practices or impose other requirements as a condition of merger approval.
A previous Ticketmaster dispute with the Justice Department culminated in a December 2019 settlement that extended the consent agreement through 2025.
Swift previously said ticket sellers had assured her team that they could handle a surge in demand and that it was “excruciating” for her to watch mistakes happen without any recourse.
