American democracy can be a real slog. Progress tends to be measured in millimeters. Victories are few and far between, as any activist will tell you. Some people may even find a kind of beauty in the way the system was designed to keep special interests in check.
But the Founding Fathers failed to anticipate the awesome power of mega-fans known as Swifties.
Here's the deal: Today, just two months after Ticketmaster botched the pre-sale for Taylor Swift's 2023 tour, Congress hauled in its parent company's president for questioning, practically blaming him for shaking the foundations of American capitalism.
"To have a strong capitalist system, you have to have competition," said Senator Amy Klobuchar, who called the hearing. "You can't have too much consolidation — something that, unfortunately for this country, as an ode to Taylor Swift, I will say, we know all too well."
(Nice one, Ames.)
ICYMI, tickets for Swift's Eras Tour, which begins in March, went up for pre-sale on Ticketmaster in mid-November. But there was so much demand, the site buckled.
Fans, who've been deprived of live Taylor shows since well before the pandemic, had a collective meltdown as they waited for hours in online queues before, in many cases, walking away empty-handed.
Then, Ticketmaster went ahead and canceled the next round of Swift ticket sales to the general public, citing "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."
Three guesses as to how that went over...
Almost immediately, fans put Ticketmaster on blast for its monopoly-like control of the ticketing industry.
That criticism is hardly new — Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2009, and as almost anyone who's bought a ticket to a live event since then can attest, the user experience feels very, um, 2009. (Which is to say, it sucks. We all know it sucks. But we all like sports and music and stuff, so we put up with the glitchy site and the garbage app and then forget about how sucky the process was by the time we're dancing and screaming out every word from 1989 while Tay completes her eleventh costume change of the evening).
In the weeks that followed the meltdown, the Senate scheduled a hearing to get to the bottom of the fiasco, and more than two dozen fans sued Live Nation for "unlawful conduct," claiming the ticketing giant violated antitrust laws.
Here are some of the highlights from Tuesday's hearing, in which lawmakers grilled Joe Berchtold, the president and CFO of Live Nation Entertainment, in between little speeches in which they dropped T-Swift lyrics to showcase their pop-culture credibility.
- The bot defense: Berchtold reiterated the company's apology and its contention that the site was hit with an unprecedented amount of bot traffic that forced it to slow down or pause sales. "We apologize to the fans," Berchtold said. "We apologize to Ms. Swift. We need to do better and we will do better."
- A rare bipartisan moment: "I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement: You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause," Sen. Richard Blumenthal told Berchtold. And, truly, it's hard to overstate the rage on either side. Here's one more zinger from Republican John Kennedy: "I am not against big, per say. I am against dumb ... The way your company handled ticket sales for Ms. Swift was a debacle."
- No easy answers: The hearing ended without a clear way forward. Senator Amy Klobuchar said some of the problems in ticketing and resale markets could be remedied with legislation. But the bigger question of whether Live Nation is a monopoly is up to the Department of Justice. Tuesday's hearing could give the DOJ political support for an eventual antitrust suit against the company.
My colleagues have more on the hearing and all its cringey name-drops here.
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