Taylor Swift Ticketmaster debacle draws attention of Senate antitrust panel

US lawmakers are poised to investigate the ticket industry after millions of Taylor Swift fans were barred from buying concert tickets for the Grammy winner’s upcoming “The Eras Tour.”

Senators Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, announced a hearing of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition, Antitrust and Consumer Rights Policy on Tuesday to examine the lack of competition in the ticketing industry . Lawmakers said “significant service failures” on Ticketmaster’s website warranted oversight by antitrust regulators.

Last Tuesday, 14 million fans attempted to pre-order tickets through Ticketmaster’s website. Many fans were left waiting in a digital queue for hours only to leave empty-handed. The failure of the service led to widespread public outcry from Swifties, with some Democratic lawmakers denouncing what they saw as a market failure caused by the “consolidation of the live entertainment and ticketing industry.”

“Last week, the problem of competition in ticketing markets became apparent when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to buy concert tickets. The high fees, site outages and cancellations experienced by customers show how Ticketmaster’s dominant position in the market means that the company does not face any pressure to continuously innovate and improve,” said President Klobuchar in a statement

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Taylor Swift, Director of Tickets
(Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Jamie McCarthy)

His concerns were echoed by Ranking Member Lee, who said, “American consumers deserve the benefit of competition in every marketplace, from grocery chains to concert halls.”

“I look forward to exercising our Subcommittee’s oversight authority to ensure that anti-competitive mergers and exclusive conduct are not crippling an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns,” Lee said.

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Ticketmaster
(Fox News Digital)

“When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

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The hearing announcement follows a letter Klobuchar sent to Ticketmaster last Wednesday raising concerns about the lack of competition in the ticketing industry after the company’s 2010 merger with Live Nation .

“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that often drive companies to innovate and improve their services. That can lead to the kinds of dramatic service failures we’ve seen this week, where the consumers are the ones paying the price,” Klobuchar wrote.

Klobuchar and several other Democratic senators wrote separately to the Justice Department encouraging antitrust law enforcement to investigate Ticketmaster to determine whether the company should be broken up. They pointed out that the company controls about 60% of the market for promoting large concerts and events and accused it of using its dominant market position to raise prices and harm consumers.

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“If the investigation reveals that Live Nation has continued to abuse its dominant market position despite two prior consent decrees, we urge the department to consider unwinding the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger and breaking up the company,” they wrote the legislators “This may be the only way to truly protect consumers, artists and venue operators and restore competition to the ticket market.”

Fox News’ Julia Musto and Brie Stimson contributed to this report.