GOP senator slams Ticketmaster for ‘exorbitantly high prices’ ahead of reported DOJ lawsuit
Following reports that the Justice Department is zeroing in on litigation against one of the biggest concert ticket companies for an alleged monopoly, one GOP senator representing Nashville, Tennessee, says she is keeping a close watch.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the DOJ is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, as early as next month.
The lawsuit would "allege the nation’s biggest concert promoter has leveraged its dominance in a way that undermined competition for ticketing live events," according to the report.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told Fox News Digital she will be "will be closely monitoring the Department’s actions" to make sure the "online ticket industry better serves America’s music fans."
"For far too long, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have allowed bots to snatch up tickets and sell them for exorbitantly high prices on the secondary market, and other ticketing companies have sold speculative tickets — which don’t actually exist — to fans," Blackburn said.
The WSJ said that "the specific claims the department would allege couldn’t be learned," but noted that in 2010 the federal government opted out of trying to block Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s merger.
The report noted that Ticketmaster, the largest ticket company in the U.S., and Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the country, merged "despite industry fears that Live Nation would use its might to compel venues to use its new ticketing arm."
Ticketmaster came under intense scrutiny last year after hundreds of thousands of Taylor Swift fans failed to secure tickets to her blockbuster "Era’s" tour.
The company was accused of excessive fees and bad customer service, and no control of bots bulk buying and reselling tickets, forcing fans to wait in a queue for hours only to find no tickets left or only ones at exorbitant prices.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News Digital that the company "blocks billions of bots daily and no one in the industry invests more in anti-bot fighting technology."
"However, it’s an escalating arms race with bots only getting smarter through AI, which is why to really improve ticketing we need laws that give artists control over resale and penalize scalpers who cheat the rules," the spokesperson said.
In an essay on its company website published last month, Live Nation’s head of corporate affairs Dan Wall pushed back against monopoly allegations, arguing that tickets are actually priced by artists and teams. He said Ticketmaster and other "primary ticketing companies" simply provide "the technology and services that venues need to manage and market shows, sell tickets, and validate tickets for entry."
Fallout from the Swift fiasco ricocheted all the way up to lawmakers in Congress and state attorneys general who feared the gigantic company engaged in anticompetitive practices.
News of the imminent antitrust lawsuit was welcomed by frustrated Ticketmaster users who might not otherwise be invested in the wonky area of American law. Francesca Mariano, host of the podcast "Chicks in the Office," called the company "a disaster."
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"They’re a monopoly. They have a monopoly on ticket sales. They make it impossible to get tickets at a reasonable price," she said in reaction to the news of the suit.
"There’s a lot of solutions that they could think of, and they just don’t do anything because it doesn’t matter, because everyone has to use them. So they’ll never make the changes to make it easier for people because they don’t have to," she added.
Blackburn, a seasoned advocate for songwriter and artist rights with many music industry constituents, says that the ticket industry needs to realign to whom it caters.
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"We must continue fighting to ensure that the ticketing industry caters to the artists, venues, and fans that make American music so special," she said.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Fox News Digital's Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.