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- Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee are asking the DOJ to keep examining Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
- The senators, who held a hearing on the company's practices, noted it failed to answer many follow-up questions.
- They're encouraging the DOJ to follow up and take action if it finds Ticketmaster avoiding competition.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee are not shaking off their qualms with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Following a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing filled with questionable Taylor Swift references and hard questions on how Ticketmaster and Live Nation's practices impact artists and the music industry, Klobuchar and Lee are calling on the Department of Justice to continue examining potential anticompetitive practices.
"For too long, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have wielded monopoly power anticompetitively, harming fans and artists alike," the senators wrote in a new letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter.
The letter and hearing come after renewed interest in the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Following the chaotic sale for Swift's Eras Tour, the FTC and antimonopoly advocates found an unlikely ally — Swifties. In particular, Swift fans who found themselves locked out of buying tickets, and coming up against what Ticketmaster later said were bot attacks, pointed to Live Nation Entertainment's supposed market concentration as the reason that the buying experience was so difficult.
Live Nation has previously stated that it "takes its responsibilities under the antitrust laws seriously and does not engage in behaviors that could justify antitrust litigation, let alone orders that would require it to alter fundamental business practices." Neither Live Nation Entertainment nor the Department of Justice immediately replied to Insider's request for comment.
The senators note that, following their hearing on Ticketmaster and Live Nation, they, like Swift, had a question. In fact, they had several — and would like some explanations.
They said they asked how many concerts every year were simultaneously promoted by Live Nation and ticketed by Ticketmaster. The company's response: They were "unable to determine" that in the time given to them, although the senators note that the company did not ask for an extension.
The company also, according to the senators, did not respond to questions on how many of the top 100 arenas Live Nation does ticketing for, or on how many venue contracts Ticketmaster lost to its competitor Paciolan. Additionally, the company did not respond to a question about whether it had entered into ticketing contracts with venues that were longer than five years.
Currently, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are under what's called a consent decree — essentially, stipulations made by the Department of Justice to allow the merger to take place. In 2019, the Department of Justice made that consent decree broader and extended it for five and a half years. The DOJ believes it violated the original consent decree for threatening to withhold concerts from venues that used a different ticketing service (Live Nation has said they "strongly disagree with the DOJ's allegations in the filing and the conclusions they seek to draw from six isolated episodes among some 5,000 ticketing deals negotiated during the life of the consent decree.")
But Klobuchar and Lee asked Live Nation if, after the consent decree expires, it would commit to third-party audits that would confirm the company is neither threatening retaliation, nor outright retaliating, against venues using other ticketing services. According to Klobuchar and Lee, Live Nation "refused to do so," and instead the company said it "does not need to be subject to a consent decree or any similar legal obligation to refrain from retaliating against a venue for using another company's ticketing services, and from threatening to retaliate for such choosing of another ticketing company."
That's not enough for Klobuchar and Lee, who urged the Department of Justice to follow up on remaining questions and take action if it finds evidence of Ticketmaster getting around competition.
"Live Nation's responses amount to 'trust us,'" the senators write. "We believe that is wholly insufficient."
Do you have anything to share about ticketing practices in the US? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@insider.com.