The Senate has scheduled a hearing to look into problems with Ticketmaster that arose during Taylor Swift’s disastrous ticketing event last year, when a cacophony of system failures left hundreds of thousands of customers stranded.
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee will take place on January 24, the committee announced Tuesday night, and addresses concerns that Ticketmaster’s market control of the ticketing industry has done consumers a serious disservice.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who chairs the subcommittee that initiated the hearing in November, said the company’s failure to adequately serve customers became “painfully obvious” during the Swift fiasco.
“For too long, consumers have faced high fees, long waits and site failures, and Ticketmaster’s market dominance means the company faces undue pressure to innovate and improve,” it said. a statement on Tuesday. “At next week’s hearing, we will examine how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry affects both customers and artists. Without competition to promote better service and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”
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Ticketmaster has come to control an overwhelming majority of the ticketing industry since it received approval from US regulators to merge with Live Nation in 2010. The company’s critics say its near-monopoly of the industry has allowed them to offer erratic service to fans and lower prices. . . – drag them to popular events.
“It’s been more than a decade since Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation, and competition in the ticketing and live entertainment industry has gotten worse,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Dick Durbin (D) said in a statement Tuesday . “Too often, consumers pay the price for this market failure.”
These setbacks were on full display during Ticketmaster’s on-sale for Swift’s highly anticipated ‘Eras’ tour. Customers selected by lottery to enter the November pre-sale event hit one hurdle after another as the website crashed repeatedly. Of the customers who managed to get a hold of the sale, many were stuck in a Ticketmaster “waiting room” for hours.
Even fans who had hoped to get tickets on the regular on-sale days lost hope when Ticketmaster suddenly announced that the sale had been canceled entirely.
The company apologized to fans for the fiasco, but largely blamed “unprecedented demand” for tickets for Swift’s stadium tour, which is set to begin in March. But the explanation didn’t win many fans because the company knew exactly how many people had access to the presale.
Swift also criticized the company’s response.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we’ve asked them, several times, if they can handle such requests and we’ve been assured that they can,” he said of the company shortly after the chaos erupted. “It’s really incredible that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that so many of them feel like they went through multiple bear attacks to get them.”
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