The United States Senate has called out Ticketmaster’s monopoly in the concert promotion industry after the platform canceled ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s tour.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar chairs a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection and anti-trust and has criticized the company multiple times over concerns about anti-trust violations.
Ticketmaster has been sharply criticized for mishandling ticket sales for Swift’s 2023 tour, her first in five years. In the “presale” round on Tuesday, many fans faced site outages and long wait times as over 2 million tickets were sold.
Klobuchar also wants the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the company, which has a virtual monopoly on concert tickets in the country. Ticketmaster and rival Live Nation merged in 2010.
Klobuchar said on MSNBC on Friday that the issue was bigger than the Swift ticket sales problems this week. “It’s about prices, hidden fees that are way too high. It’s about site disruptions,” she said.
“There just has to be consequences for this kind of behavior,” Klobuchar also told WCCO. “Because unlike competitive markets, where you just go down the street if you don’t like one store, you go to this store, you go to this grocery store — you don’t have that choice here.”
