Ticketmaster execs apologize to Taylor Swift fans over ticket hoax

The Senate Judiciary Committee set its sights on Ticketmaster’s monopoly of the concert ticketing industry in one of the committee’s first hearings of the new Congress.

The chair of the antitrust subcommittee, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., drew on her own love of music and lamented that today’s teens can’t afford concert tickets as easily as she could in her youth.

The senator recalled getting into a friend’s truck and going to see Led Zeppelin, The Cars and Aerosmith. “Now I don’t think it’s easy for high school kids to make money at a baker’s shop on the weekends and buy tickets to go see these big concerts.”

The Minnesota Democrat worked on a Taylor Swift reference: ‘To have a strong capitalist system, you need to have competition. You can’t have too much consolidation. Something that unfortunately for this country, as an ode to Taylor Swift, we know all too well.”

“We need to make sure we have competition to bring prices down,” he added, noting that LiveNation/Ticketmaster now command 70 percent of the ticketing market since their merger in 2010. He also noted that a Government Accountability Office study found that about 27 percent of ticket prices now go to fares.

The audience was filled with references to Taylor Swift.

‘Mister. Berchtold, I want to congratulate you on an amazing achievement: he has brought Republicans and Democrats together,’ said Senator Richard Blumenthal. “Ticketmaster should look in the mirror and say ‘I’m the problem, it’s me,'” he added in a nod to Swift’s anti-hero.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said he hoped Republicans would be in the majority on this point, making him chair of the antitrust subcommittee. ‘To be honest, a few months ago I was hoping to get the deck back [from Klobuchar]…but once again, she’s the cheerleader and I’m in the stands,” a reference to Swift’s You Belong with Me.

“Specifically in the ticketing industry, when it comes to transparency and touting and restoring competition in our markets, it’s about making sure fans get fair prices and better service,” Klobuchar said. “Today’s concertgoers should be able to have the same experiences I had when I was in high school when it didn’t cost much, just being able to go see a band and remember it forever.”

Joe Berchtold, LiveNation’s president and chief financial officer, blamed bots trying to snatch tickets from Taylor Swift and causing a ticket sales fiasco for her Midnights tour.

He explained:

“There is also a long-standing practice in the industry of artists pricing tickets well below market value to make them more affordable. Those supply, demand, and price conditions lead to scalping, which in the internet age is largely achieved through the use of bots to purchase tickets and online secondary marketplaces to sell them.

“There was an unprecedented demand for Taylor Swift tickets,” Berchtold said. “We knew that bots would attack that sale and we planned accordingly.”

“In hindsight, there are several things we could have done better, including staggering sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job of setting fan expectations for tickets.”

He said Ticketmaster was “hit with three times the amount of bot traffic we’ve ever experienced” for Taylor Swift tickets.

“While the bots have failed to penetrate our systems to request tickets, the attack requires us to slow down and even pause our sales,” he added.

We apologize to the fans. We apologize to Ms. Swift. We have to improve, and we will do better.’

Berchtold later claimed: ‘The major ticket companies…do not set ticket prices. We do not decide how many tickets go on sale and when. And we do not set service fees.

Another witness in the hearing, singer-songwriter Clyde Lawrence, said he was “very surprised to hear Berchtold say this.”

“Because of Live Nations’ control of the entire industry, we have virtually no influence in the negotiation.”

Who sets the ticket prices? Sen. Dick Durbin asked Berchtold.

“The band sets the ticket price, the venue sets the service fee,” Berchtold said, while Ticketmaster owns about 200 of the 4,000 venues it sells tickets for.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, shot down Berchtold’s claim that a wave of bot attacks was to blame for the Taylor Swift debacle.

“Our critical infrastructure in this country, whether it’s utilities, electric water, banking services, credit card processors, payment processors, health care companies, you know what, are being attacked every day by the thousands,” he said.

‘You should be able to get some good advice from some people and figure this out.’

Senator John Kennedy suggested that Ticketmaster could make tickets non-transferable to reduce bots.

The idea is to stop scalping, but many people who buy concert tickets and then cannot attend would eat up the cost of their tickets.

He added that whoever was in charge of launching Swift’s Midnight tickets “should be fired.”

The Louisiana Republican said he wasn’t necessarily in favor of breaking up big business.

‘I’m not against big, per say. I’m against fools,’ he told Berchtold. “The way her company handled ticket sales for Ms. Swift was a debacle.”

The Justice Department, which helped broker the 2010 Ticketmaster-Livenation merger, has launched its own investigation into whether Live Nation Entertainment abused its stranglehold on the multibillion-dollar live music industry.

The investigation even predates the failed launch of a pre-sale for Swift’s upcoming tour after Ticketmaster’s system crashed, leaving millions of fans who had waited hours in line to buy tickets with no way to access them.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift fans are now suing Ticketmaster over the November 15 pre-sale ticket debacle for her Eras Tour.

A couple dozen fans of the superstar, 32, are reportedly suing the company for “fraud, price fixing and antitrust violations” as well as “intentional deception” as they claim the video giant tickets allowed scalpers to purchase tickets according to TMZ.

The lawsuit claims that because the company has control of the primary ticketing market, as well as the secondary market, they were “eager to allow” scalpers in the pre-sale event, as they would earn “additional fees” for each ticket resold. .

It comes after Ticketmaster finally apologized to Swift and her fans after a catastrophic November pre-sales for her Eras tour, citing bot attacks and a massive demand to leave fans in a virtual line for hours and others without power. buy tickets.

The ticketing titan canceled general ticket sales and issued a now-deleted statement that did not include an apology, prompting a furious response from Swift herself.

She said she was “confident” the company could handle the high demand for tickets and “it really bothers me that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”