Taylor Swift accepts an award onstage throughout the MTV Europe Music Awards 2022 held at PSD Bank Dome on November 13, 2022 in Duesseldorf, Germany.
Jeff Kravitz | Filmmagic | Getty Images
Lawmakers have some questions for Live Nation’s CEO after Ticketmaster bungled the current sale of Taylor Swift tour tickets.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee penned a letter to Michael Rapino Tuesday asking the manager to make clear Live Nation’s ticketing course of for the Eras tour and supply a listing of actions the corporate will take to make sure shoppers can have higher entry to dwell leisure sooner or later. Live Nation is the dad or mum firm of Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster was purported to open up gross sales for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift followers final month forward of basic public ticket gross sales. However, greater than 14 million customers flocked to the positioning, together with bots, spurring huge delays and lockouts on the positioning. Ultimately, 2 million tickets had been offered throughout the presale and most of the people sale was canceled, firm representatives mentioned.
Ticketmaster mentioned 3.5 million individuals had preregistered as a part of the “Verified Fan” program, which was designed to maintain tickets within the arms of precise followers and never resellers, leading to way more requests for tickets than may very well be fulfilled.
“This statement raises questions over your bot management solution and its ability to adequately protect consumers,” the House committee wrote in a letter.
The committee additionally requested that Rapino present insights into Ticketmaster’s extra charges, insider reserves, dynamic pricing, restrictions on transferability of tickets, its verified fan program and scalping by bots and different scammers.
The committee famous in its letter that there’s laws is in place to handle anti-consumer practices and that Ticketmaster may very well be slapped with fines if it “knowingly sold tickets that were improperly purchased” by automated processes.
The committee requested that Rapino schedule a briefing by Dec. 15.
Representatives from Live Nation didn’t instantly reply to CNBC’s request for remark.
Live Nation, which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, has confronted long-standing criticisms about its dimension and energy within the leisure trade — complaints which have solely gained steam following the Eras tour debacle.
Swift herself publicly slammed the corporate for bungling the gross sales course of.
“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 wrote in an Instagram put up final month. “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.”
Eras tour tickets had been priced from $49 to $450, with VIP packages beginning at $199 and reaching $899. Secondary market costs might be seen starting from $800 to $20,000 per ticket.
