The president and CFO of Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation is testifying before a Senate committee on Taylor Swift's Eras ticket fiasco.
Lawmakers are grilling top executives from the event ticketing industry on Tuesday after Ticketmaster's inability to process orders for Taylor Swift's upcoming tour left millions of fans unable to buy tickets or without their ticket even after purchase.
As fury grew among legions of hardcore Swifties, Swift herself weighed in on the fiasco. "It goes without saying that I'm extremely protective of my fans," Swift wrote on Instagram in November. "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."
"As we said after the onsale, and I reiterate today, we apologize to the many disappointed fans as well as to Ms. Swift," he said in the opening remarks. Berchtold also noted some things the service could have done differently "in hindsight," including "staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets.
Concert promoter Live Nation and ticketing company Ticketmaster, two of the largest companies in the concert business, announced their merger in 2009. The deal at the time raised concerns, including from the US Department of Justice, that it would create a near-monopoly in the industry. "Ticketmaster's power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services," Klobuchar, who chairs the antitrust subcommittee, wrote in an open letter to Ticketmaster's CEO in November. "That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.
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