Senator Amy Klobuchar has filed a complaint against Ticketmaster saying that the site’s “power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services.” Ticketmaster suffered widespread issues during a presale ticket event for an upcoming Taylor Swift tour. In her letter to the company, Klobuchar wrote that Swift fans were unable to purchase tickets and faced extremely high prices which suggests that the company is “abusing its market positions.”
According to CNN:
Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the country’s largest concert promoter, merged about a decade ago. Klobuchar noted that the company at the time pledged to “develop an easy-access, one-stop platform” for ticket delivery. On Thursday, the senator told Rapino that it “appears that your confidence was misplaced.”
“When Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, it was subject to an antitrust consent decree that prohibited it from abusing its market position,” Klobuchar wrote. “Nonetheless, there have been numerous complaints about your company’s compliance with that decree.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also called for Ticketmaster to be regulated in a tweet:
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reined in,”
