The crash of Ticketmaster’s website amid an overload of demand for Taylor Swift tickets has led to a Senate hearing, as lawmakers seize on the incident to scrutinize a host of business practices in the ticketing industry.
The full Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing for next Tuesday — That’s The Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment — following the November debacle in which Swift fans were locked out of presales and a public sale was canceled.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who chairs the antitrust subcommittee, said in a statement that “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.
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.” Shortly after the website crash, Klobuchar wrote a letter to Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapino in November “serious concerns about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers.” The Justice Department reportedly launched an investigation of Live Nation-Ticketmaster before the incident.
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