Live Nation, parent company of Ticketmaster, investigated for abuse of power

The New York Times has reported that the US Department of Justice is to launch an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster.

This information comes after unprecedented queuing times and technical difficulties left many Taylor Swift fans disappointed when they attempted to purchase tickets for her 2023 Eras Tour through the selling site.

Citing “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand,” Ticketmaster made the decision to cancel ticket sales on 17th November, following the fiasco.

Swift, releasing a lengthy statement on Instagram stories following the ticket chaos and following backlash wrote, “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…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.”

The issue seems to have stemmed from Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan Program, which is designed to filter out bots who have the capabilities to purchase large quantities of tickets. According to the NY Times, in a promptly-deleted post by Ticketmaster, the company stated that 3.5 million users signed up to their Verified Fan Program, with 1.5 million of those users being sent codes or “invited”, with the remaining two million placed on a waiting list.

Live Nation Entertainment was created in 2010 when Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged together. There was widespread opposition amongst the music industry at the time of their union, which saw the company forced to sell parts of their business under the terms of their coalition.

Since then, the company has been no stranger to controversy, with an amendment to their original agreement in 2019 by the Justice Department after finding the company had violated certain terms of their original deal.

You can find Live Nation’s official statement here.