The outcry over Taylor Swift fans being unable to secure tickets to her upcoming tour has even reached the halls of Congress.
Following stories of servers crashing, long waits and crazy prices, Variety reports that Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-MI, has written a letter to Ticketmaster about its near-monopoly of the U.S. ticketing industry and its apparent poor customer service. Klobuchar did so in her role as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights.
In her letter to Michael Rapino, the president and CEO of Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, Klobuchar expresses "serious concerns about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers," adding that Ticketmaster's "dramatic service failures," like the ones experienced by Taylor fans, "suggest that Ticketmaster continues to abuse its market positions.”
Klobuchar is just the latest congressperson to criticize Ticketmaster in recent years: Others have complained about its "dynamic pricing" model, which recently resulted in ridiculously high prices for tickets to Bruce Springsteen's 2023 tour.
Variety reports that reps for Ticketmaster haven't responded to requests for comment on Klobuchar's letter, but in September, they addressed the complaint about the Springsteen tickets by saying that the company had lost so much money in recent years due to ticket resellers, it had to switched to "market-based" — i.e. dynamic — pricing "to recapture that lost revenue.”
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