The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a hearing looking into entertainment giant Live Nation's role in the botched pre-sales process for Taylor Swift's Eras tour. A combination of website outages, high fees, and long wait times caused a backlash among customers who were already frustrated with the company's market dominance. 

"To have a strong capitalist system, you have to have competition. You can't have too much consolidation — something that, unfortunately for this country, as an ode to Taylor Swift, I will say, we know 'all too well," said Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

While T-Swizzle herself was not in attendance, a cross-section of musical artists, small venue owners, rival ticket companies, and legal experts offered their perspective. Joe Berchtold, president and CFO of Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation Entertainment, also used the occasion to once again apologize for the issues. 

"As we said after the on-sale, and I reiterate today: We apologize to the fans. We apologize to Ms. Swift. We need to do better and we will do better," he said. 

However, Berchtold maintained that Live Nation's dominant position in the market was not responsible for the mishaps surrounding Swift's Eras tour. Instead he pointed the finger at a bot attack that caused massive inflow of traffic to the Ticketmaster website. 

“While the bots failed to penetrate our systems or acquire any tickets, the attack required us to slow down and even pause our sales,” Berchtold said in a prepared statement. He added that companies such as Ticketmaster are currently in an "arms race" with bots, scalpers, and cyber criminals trying to buy tickets for resale. 

Jerry Mickelson, CEO and president at Jam Productions, a venue-owner in Chicago, rejected this explanation. "You can't blame bots for what happened to Taylor Swift. There's more to that story that you're not hearing," he said. 

Jack Groetzinger, CEO and founder of rival ticket company SeatGeek, blamed the fact that Live Nation essentially has a monopoly on ticket sales for live events.  

"Live Nation controls the most popular entertainers in the world, routes most of the large tours, operates the ticketing systems, and even owns many of the venues," he said. "This power over the entire live entertainment industry allows Live Nation to maintain its monopolistic influence over the primary ticketing market."

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle tended to agree with this assessment, and several floated the idea of the Department of Justice pursuing an antitrust lawsuit. 

“I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement: You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause,” said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal to Berchtold. 

Updated: Added missing citation for the quote in the second paragraph.

Share:
More In Business
Klarna shares jump 30% on Wall Street debut
Swedish buy now, pay later company Klarna is making its highly anticipated public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, the latest in a run of high-profile initial public offerings this year. The offering priced at $40 Tuesday, above the forecasted range of $35 to $37 a share, valuing the company at more than $15 billion. The valuation easily makes Klarna one of the biggest IPOs so far in 2025, which has been one of the busier years for companies going public. Other popular IPOs so far this year include the design software company Figma and Circle Internet Group, which issues the USDC stablecoin..
Musk loses crown as world’s richest to software giant Larry Ellison
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wrested the title of the world’s richest man from longtime holder Elon Musk early Wednesday as stock in his software giant rocketed more than a third in a stunning few minutes of trading. That is according to wealth tracker Bloomberg. A college dropout, the 81-year-old Ellison is now worth $393 billion, Bloomberg says, several billion more than Musk, who had been the world’s richest for four years. The switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle. Forbes still has Musk as the richest, however, valuing his private businesses much higher.
Load More