U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, confirmed Tuesday (Nov. 22) that they will hold a hearing to “consider” what they refer to as “lack of competition in the ticketing industry”.
In a press release, they write that the hearing follows “significant service failures and delays on Ticketmaster’s website that prevented fans from purchasing concert tickets.”
Klobuchar and Lee said the court date and witnesses will be announced at a later date.
On Tuesday, November 15, demand outstripped supply last week during the Superstar Eras Tour “Verified Fan” pre-sale. The tour was tagged by nation liveTicket master. The tour promoter is Live Nation rival AEG.
The debacle led to calls, including from members of Congress, for Live Nation and Ticketmaster be broken.
On Thursday, Nov. 17, Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, wrote a letter to Live Nation President and CEO Michael Rapino raising concerns about what she says is “the lack of competition in the ticketing industry.”
Now, this committee is going even further by holding a hearing.
In a statement on Tuesday, Klobuchar said “the high fees, site disruptions and cancellations customers have experienced show how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company is under no pressure to innovate. and continually improve.”
Live Nation and Ticket Master merged in 2010 and the deal was investigated and then approved by the United States Department of Justice with a few conditions.
One of them was the consent decree — an antitrust agreement reached in 2010 — that allowed Live Nation to merge with Ticketmaster and included safeguards to prevent anti-competitive behavior in the years following the merger.
It prohibited Live Nation from doing things like “retaliating” against venues for using other ticketing companies or threatening venues, for example.
This consent decree was supposed to end in 2020, but the DOJ extended he by five and a half years.
In a blog post published last week, what was originally deletedthen reposted with updated numbers and a written apology to Swift and her fans, Ticketmaster defended its verified fan system, saying it’s “designed to help manage high-demand shows – identifying real humans and eliminating bots”.
The platform noted that more than 3.5 million people have pre-registered for Taylor Swift tickets, which it says is “the largest registration in history.”
Ticketmaster then sent codes to 1.5 million people to join the on-sale for all 52 show dates, including the 47 sold by Ticketmaster.
“The remaining 2 million verified fans have been placed on a waitlist on the odd chance that tickets will still be available after those who received the codes have made their purchases,” he said.
“The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations customers have experienced show how Ticketmaster’s dominant position in the market means the company is under no pressure to innovate and continually improve.”
Amy Klobuchar
Klobuchar said: “Last week the problem of competition in ticketing markets became painfully evident when the Ticketmaster website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to buy concert tickets.
“The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations customers have experienced show how Ticketmaster’s dominant position in the market means the company is under no pressure to innovate and continually improve.
“That’s why we’ll be hosting a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and box office industry is hurting customers and performers. When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.
“American consumers deserve to benefit from competition in every market, from grocery chains to music venues.”
mike lee
Lee said, “American consumers deserve to benefit from competition in every market, from grocery chains to music venues.
“I look forward to exercising the oversight authority of our subcommittee to ensure that anti-competitive mergers and exclusionary behavior do not cripple an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic shutdowns.”
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