www.ticketnews.com: Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) announced plans to hold a hearing to examine the lack of competition in the ticketing industry in the wake of the Taylor Swift debacle that has dominated headlines for more than a week. The senators are the Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights.
2 comments:
As much as I don’t like ticketmaster or their monopolistic tendencies, so far none of these articles I’ve read have explained any specific laws or provisions in their consent decrees that live nation or ticketmaster are breaking. The debacle around the Taylor Swift concerts is annoying, but it doesn’t strike me as illegal at face value. If another promoters ticket system went down I don’t think it would cause action from the government at all. No one has an inherent right to see this artist and it is a business transaction fundamentally. It sounds to me like the main problme is that thye are partaking in anti-competitetive behavior which I don’t have a full understanding of the laws surrounding it. It’s nice that thye are looking at it from a bipartisan perspective, but it is amusing to me that people always say that the free market will regulate itself. That’s true to a point, but thye had to break up Bell telephone and I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon or Ticketmaster have to get broken up.
It is interesting that this is going to the Senate when I am not sure anything truly illegal happened here. It was certainly icky and Ticketmaster took advantage of people as they usually do, but are there specific federal laws that prevent this kind of exploitation? It is cool that there is a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights because even if there are not specific laws that prevent this sort of thing, perhaps there should be. It is interesting that their whole reasoning behind all of this is to encourage competition, which is a very capitalist idea when this whole situation was caused by capitalism. They also raised the point that the entertainment industry is still trying to recover from the pandemic lockdown because while certainly some events on Ticketmaster would support that, I highly doubt that Taylor Swift suffered greatly during the pandemic while living in her mansion that probably covers enough acreage to cover a small city.
Post a Comment