Ticketmaster Will Now Have to Explain Itself to Lawmakers Following Taylor Swift Ticket Disaster

The fallout continues from final week’s Ticketmaster fiasco as Taylor Swift followers scrambled to purchase tickets to the popstar’s upcoming The Eras Tour. The surge promptly crashed Ticketmaster’s web site. In the aftermath, an echoing battlecry from followers, musicians, and politicians emerged towards Ticketmaster for his or her alleged mishandling of the tour’s presale. Today, Democratic Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced a bipartisan listening to with Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee to analyze Ticketmaster’s monopoly on reside occasions.

Klobuchar and Lee are the chair and rating member, respectively, of the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights which is able to examine Ticketmaster’s dealing with of Swift’s presale for the Eras Tour, in accordance with Klobuchar’s web site. Klobuchar wrote a letter to Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapino over her issues in regards to the degree of affect Ticketmaster has on the reside occasion trade. The date of the upcoming listening to and any witnesses known as might be introduced at a later date.

“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets,” Klobuchar stated in a press release. “That’s why we will hold a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry harms customers and artists alike. When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”

Ticketmaster is a large that definitely gained’t go down with no struggle. Swift herself expressed her frustration after the presale chaos erupted for her upcoming tour, which is scheduled to start this spring. “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 in an announcement on her Instagram story this previous Friday. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked [Ticketmaster], multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”

Last Tuesday, verified followers who obtained a particular entry code might take part in presale for tickets to Swift’s The Era’s Tour. Presale started promptly at 10 a.m. ET for East Coast venues, and 20 minutes later, Ticketmaster’s web site started crashing. Website outages plagued Ticketmaster all through the remainder of the day and Ticketmaster scrambled to reschedule the remaining presale for later occasions to ease the site visitors burden.

However, the corporate confirmed on Twitter Thursday, November 17 that the general public normal sale for tickets that was rescheduled to start on Friday, November 18 was cancelled on account of “extraordinarily high demand.” Ticketmaster claimed later that upwards of 2.4 million tickets have been already offered, and the corporate later apologized to each Swift and Swifties alike.