Live Nation CEO apologizes to Taylor Swift, fans for ticket fiasco

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Live Nation CEO apologizes to Taylor Swift, fans for ticket fiasco

WASHINGTON Live Nation Entertainment's president apologized to pop star Taylor Swift and her fans for a major fiasco involving ticket sales for her concert tour, as a U.S. Senate hearing on competition in the ticket industry began on Tuesday.

Ticketmaster, a company that has been unpopular with fans for years, has drawn renewed heat from U.S. lawmakers over how it handled ticket sales for Swift's Eras tour, her first in five years. Ticketmaster has more than 70 percent of the market share of primary ticket services for major U.S. concert venues, according to experts.

We apologize to the fans, and we apologize to Ms. Joe Berchtold, who is the chief financial officer of Ticketmaster parent Live Nation, told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that Swift needed to do better and that he will do better.

In hindsight, there are several things we could have done better, including securing tickets over a longer period of time and setting fan expectations for tickets, according to Berchtold.

In an opening statement, Republican Senator Mike Lee said that there was a need to consider whether new legislation or better enforcement of existing laws would be needed to protect the American people. Jack Groetzinger, co-founder of SeatGeek, said the process of buying tickets is antiquated and ripe for innovation and called for the dissolution of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which was merged in 2010.

As long as Live Nation remains the dominant concert promoter and ticketer of major venues in the U.S., the industry will continue to struggle and lack competition, he told lawmakers.

Ticketmaster has argued that bots used by scalpers were behind the Taylor Swift debacle, and Berchtold is expected to ask for more help in fighting bots that buy tickets for resale, sometimes at astronomical prices.

Other witnesses include Jerry Mickelson, president of JAM Productions, who has been a critic of Ticketmaster.

In November, Ticketmaster canceled a planned ticket sale for Swift's tour after more than 3.5 billion requests from fans, bots and scalpers overwhelmed its website.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, said the issues that cropped up in November were not new and could possibly stemmed from consolidation in the ticketing industry.

In November, the company denied any anticompetitive practices and said it remained under a consent decree with the Justice Department after its merger with Live Nation in 2010 and there was no evidence of systemic violations of the consent decree. A Ticketmaster dispute with the Justice Department culminated in a settlement in December 2019 that extended the consent agreement into 2025.