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After a huge online fiasco involving tour tickets for Taylor Swift, the Department of Justice is now reportedly beginning to investigate Live Nation & Ticketmaster’s practices.
According to reports, the anger and frustration expressed online last week Tuesday (Nov. 15) by fans of the pop singer trying to get tickets for her upcoming Eras tour, prompted the federal body to investigate Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. Ticketmaster offered an apology to Swift and the fans in a statement released via Twitter last Friday (Nov. 18). The company claimed that a combination of record-high demand (reportedly 3.5 billion requests were made), bot attacks, and requests without special codes “broke parts of their website.”
Sources claim that the DOJ has reached out to music venues and other entities in the ticketing industry to gauge the effects of Live Nation’s practices in the industry. Citing anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, the sources also note that its scope seems to focus on whether Live Nation has a monopoly on the industry, according to the New York Times.
The botched presale event on Tuesday caused Ticketmaster to cancel plans for a general ticket sale the following Friday, without disclosing the number of tickets already sold and how many were left. Swift expressed her disappointment. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone,” Ms. Swift wrote in an Instagram Story, “because we asked them, multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured that they could.”
The Live Nation & Ticketmaster merger has been a sore spot for the federal government, and it has led prominent voices to speak out in the wake of the ticket controversy. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for their merger to be broken up via Twitter:
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) wrote a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino on Wednesday expressing that she had “serious concerns” about the company’s dominance in the industry. The Senator is the chairperson of the Senate subcommittee overseeing competition policy, antitrust, and consumer rights. The attorneys general of North Carolina and Tennessee announced their own investigations of Live Nation and Ticketmaster last week.
Live Nation issued a statement through its website in response to the public scrutiny, stating that it “takes its responsibilities under the antitrust laws seriously,” also claiming that “Ticketmaster also does not embrace deceptive and questionable secondary ticketing practices.”
