U.S. opened Live Nation probe before Taylor Swift ticket fiasco
, Bloomberg News
The Justice Department is probing Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and its Ticketmaster unit over whether the entertainment giant is abusing its power over the live music industry, three people familiar with the investigation said.
The probe comes amid a debacle for the ticketing giant, which was forced to cancel public sales for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour after its site crashed earlier in the week during massive presale demand.
Shares of Live Nation Entertainment fell as much as 9.5 per cent after the New York Times reported on the probe earlier Friday, and was down 7.3 per cent to US$66.49 as of 3:44 p.m. in New York.
The antitrust investigation began earlier this year, before the Swift ticketing fiasco. It was based on complaints by live event venues and ticketing companies, the people said, asking not to be named discussing a confidential probe.
The new probe is separate from court-ordered monitoring of Ticketmaster that the government imposed in 2019 in response to previous antitrust complaints.
The Justice Department declined to comment. Ticketmaster and LiveNation didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Scrutiny of Ticketmaster is building based on a rising chorus of complaints in recent months. The attorneys general of North Carolina and Tennessee said they were investigating consumer complaints over Ticketmaster and the Senate plans to have a hearing about it next month chaired by Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, acquired Ticketmaster, the largest ticketing site in 2010, in a deal that received close scrutiny from regulators. The Justice Department approved the merger in a 2010 settlement that required Ticketmaster to license its ticketing software and divest some ticketing assets. In 2019, the DOJ’s antitrust division found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster violated the terms of that settlement and imposed new conditions, including an ongoing monitor.
Ticketmaster has perennially fielded complaints from fans and politicians about the price and availability of concert tickets. This summer the company came under fire when some seats for Bruce Springsteen shows were sold for thousands of dollars, using the company’s dynamic pricing mechanism. Ticketmaster said the highest-priced tickets accounted for a relatively small number of seats.
Swift’s concert sales fiasco has rekindled the ire. Many would-be concertgoers were approved by Ticketmaster’s verified fan process, which is designed to weed out ticket scalpers, only to find they were put on a waitlist. Others saw the site crash when they tried to buy tickets. The company ended up canceling sales to the general public, which were originally scheduled for Friday, citing unprecedented demand and limited supply.
Swift said the bungled presale for her upcoming “Eras Tour” concerts, was “excruciating” and that it was difficult to “watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
Live Nation isn’t the promoter of the Swift shows, that’s done by AEG and Messina Touring Group. Nor is Ticketmaster the only seller. Swift added concerts in recent weeks to meet the demand. The artist hasn’t toured in years, and the album she released last month, Midnights, has been another strong seller.
Nov 18 2022,
Piotr Swat/Shutterstock
The US Justice Department is investigating Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment to determine whether an abuse of power has occurred in the live music industry.
The New York Times reports that this investigation was already underway before Ticketmaster began making headlines for botching Taylor Swift’s concert ticket sales.
According to the news outlet, antitrust investigators have anonymously spoken to sources in the concert management field — such as venue operators — to see if Live Nation maintained a monopoly in the industry.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, garnering much more power than they did individually in the last decade. The merger was approved by the Justice Department despite suspicion and opposition from others involved in the music industry.
In 2019, just before the pandemic disrupted business for everyone, Live Nation organized 40,000 events and sold nearly 500 million tickets via Ticketmaster. That same year, an investigation found that Live Nation had violated terms of its decree. The Justice Department demanded clarification on ticket sale practices with venues, reports the NYT.
On Friday, Taylor Swift spoke up against the corporation on her Instagram story as well.
@taylorswift/Instagram
“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
She went on to add that there was a “multitude of reasons” why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and that she’s trying to figure out how the situation can be improved in the future.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” she said. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Legal trouble brews for Ticketmaster Canada and Live Nation
This story comes just under a month after a class-action lawsuit was filed against Ticketmaster Canada over delays in refunding customers for tickets they bought to shows affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In April, Shayne Beaucage filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster Canada and Live Nation, and it was certified as a class-action suit in Ontario in September. He now represents everyone in the class.
According to court documents, the plaintiff alleged that customers who purchased tickets to events that were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic were entitled to prompt refunds, in the original form of payment, under the terms of their contracts with Ticketmaster or under consumer protection laws.
Ticketmaster denied the allegations and said that by November 30, 2020, all ticket holders had been provided refunds, or the option to receive refunds, for all but 12 events in Canada that had been postponed, rescheduled, or cancelled after March 11, 2020, due to pandemic.
This excludes Quebec. The province has its own lawsuit against Ticketmaster Canada in progress.
In late September, a settlement agreement was proposed and Ticketmaster agreed to compensate certain members of the class by giving them $5 gift cards per eligible ticket purchased. The company would also have to pay $100,000 additionally to settle the class action, bringing the total costs to $137,545.
You could be eligible for credit if you bought tickets for any of the following events. These are the 12 events for which, as per Ticketmaster’s own admission, refunds were not available prior to November 30, 2020:
kmlaw.ca
In May of 2020, a person called Ryan MacIntyre helmed a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster Canada and Live Nation. With him were Canadians who purchased one or more tickets from the parties for events taking place after March 13 that year, that were postponed, rescheduled, or canceled.
If the settlement for Beaucage v. Ticketmaster Canada Holdings ULC et al. is not approved, litigation is expected to continue. Ontario Superior Court of Justice will hold a hearing on December 15 at 10:00 ET to share the verdict.
The DOJ and multiple state attorneys general are investigating Ticketmaster following its disastrous handling of Taylor Swift's recent tour sale.
By Mack DeGeurin
Published Yesterday
Taylor Swift’s legion of rabid fans might just be able to accomplish something decades of legal scholars, millions in political lobbying, and the Biden administration couldn’t: implement meaningful antitrust reform.
Sources speaking in a New York Times report Friday say the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s parent company, following the disastrous fallout of the pop star’s most recent tour ticket sale implosion. The investigation into the ticket selling behemoth, long disdained by both consumers and artists alike, will reportedly revolve around whether or not it possesses anti-competitive monopoly power in the music industry.
Ticketmaster’s website crumbled earlier this week under the immense weight of Swift fans desperately attempting to purchase presale tickets for the artists’ “The Eras” Tour. On Thursday, the day Swift’s tickets were intended to become valuable to the public, Ticketmaster made the unprecedented decision to cancel ticket sales entirely. In a Tweet, Ticketmaster said they opted to cancel the sale due to, “extraordinary high demands on ticketing sales and insufficient remaining ticket inventory.”
Though the disastrous handling of Swift’s tickets will almost certainly come up in the investigation, DOJ officials have reportedly had their eyes on Ticketmaster for months, the Times notes. Investigators have spoken with music venues, and others within the industry to try and determine whether or not Ticketmaster’s notoriously noxious business practices amount to monopoly actions. The Live Nation Entertainment juggernaut is the result of a 2010 merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster who were both among the industry’s largest players at the time.
DOJ investigators aren’t the only ones looking into Ticketmaster either. This week, following a groundswell of complaints from Swift fans, the The Attorneys General of Tennessee and North Carolina each launched their own investigations into the company’s business practice to determine whether or not they violated consumer rights and antitrust laws. Members of Congress, meanwhile, are reportedly planning to hold a hearing by the end of the year where they will discuss Ticketmaster’s mishandling of the Swift ticket sales and other aspects of its business consumers have decried for years.
“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price,” U.S Senator Amy Klobuchar wrote in a letter addressed to Ticketmaster.
Swift, who’s received her own share of criticism for her alleged complicity in the ticketing drama, spoke out against Ticketmaster this week in an Instagram post.
“There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” Swift wrote. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
The sustained outrage expressed by Swift fans has managed to fast track antitrust concerns related to Ticketmaster experts and advocates have nurtured for years. Earlier this year, an alliance of organizations led by American Economic Liberties Project launched a news campaign aimed at breaking up Ticketmaster. The coalition argues Ticketmaster sustained market dominance, which they say accounts for as much as 70% of the primary ticket and live event venues market, has exploited customers and held sports and music fans “hostage.”
“We are thrilled to see the Department of Justice Antitrust Division investigate Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s ongoing monopoly abuse of fans, artists, venues, and live events professionals,” the Break Up Ticketmaster Coalition said in a statement Friday. “This is a day of optimism and hope for over 40,000 people who have called on the DOJ to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster, a corporation that has bent and broken the industry to its will since its entities merged in 2010.”
Live Nation Entertainment did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Swift fans’ massive public backlash this week is just the latest in a string of high profile vocal complaints raised against Ticketmaster. In October fans attempting to purchase tickets for a Blink 182 reunion tour were forced to pay exorbitant prices, in some cases well over $600, for general admission tickets. Those absurd prices are made possible, in part, due to Ticketmaster’s so-called “dynamic pricing” algorithm, an anti-scalping feature created in coordination with Bruce Springsteen. That model, which works somewhat like Uber’s surge pricing, is intended to measure the market price of a concert ticket and jack up prices high enough to effectively wean out resellers. In reality, the system ends up pricing consumers out of tickets entirely.
Elsewhere, critics have accused Ticketmaster of price gouging withholding tickets, and rolling out ever more onerous and difficult to parse “service fees.”
“Everyday Americans are being scammed and extorted by Ticketmaster for wanting to see their favorite sports teams and artists perform,” Helen Brosnan, Executive Director of Fight Corporate Monopolies said in a statement. “More than a decade later, their merger has resulted in consumers being held hostage by a company that uses its monopoly power to make everyone’s experience miserable—artists, concertgoers and sports fans, and independent venues alike. It should have never happened in the first place and the DOJ must step in and break them up.”
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