US senators held a hearing to question Ticketmaster executives in Washington on Tuesday to see if the company’s dominance in the events industry led to the fiasco in ticket sales for the upcoming tour. Taylor Swift.
Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said that, when she was younger, she used to go see many bands in concert, such as Led Zeppelin, The Cars and Aerosmith.
Now, however, she is sorry to see that the price of tickets means that many music lovers can no longer even afford to attend these shows. She also denounced that the costs associated with the sale of tickets now represent on average 27% of the price of the ticket, sometimes reaching up to 75%.
For meme Klobuchar, it’s clear that Ticketmaster’s dominant position in the event industry means the company doesn’t have much pressure to innovate and improve.
“If you want to have a good capitalist system, you have to have competition,” said Mr.me Klobuchar at a United States Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
Ticketmaster is the largest ticket selling company in the world, selling more than 500 million tickets each year in more than 30 countries.
Last November, Ticketmaster’s platform crashed during presale for Taylor Swift’s stadium tour. According to the company, its site had been taken over by an extremely high number of admirers, but also by bot attacks. Many people were never able to get tickets, even though they had waited several hours in a virtual waiting room.
More than 3.5 million people would have registered on the Ticketmaster platform for the presale, according to the company, which represented a record. The later scheduled public sale was eventually cancelled, as there were no more tickets available.
Merger with Live Nation
In 2010, Ticketmaster merged with another American events giant, Live Nation, for the production of concerts, festivals and tours.
On Tuesday, Live Nation President and CEO Joe Berchtold apologized to Taylor Swift fans and the artist herself, acknowledging the company needed to do better.
However, he recalled that it is not Ticketmaster who decides the price of tickets and the number of places that will be available for a concert. As for the service fees, they are established by the concert halls, he pleaded.
According to Berchtold, Ticketmaster has also lost, not gained, market share since its merger with Live Nation.
Instead, Berchtold argued that the events industry would like elected officials to focus more on the problem of reselling tickets and to ban fraudulent practices, such as reselling tickets that have not yet been officially released. for sale.