The DOJ has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster’s owner

guest · Nov 18, 2022

By Jay Peters @jaypeters - November 18, 2022

The Department of Justice is investigating Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation Entertainment over antitrust concerns, The New York Times reported Friday. Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 but have come under scrutiny for largely dominating the live event ticket sales market. Ticketmaster has received renewed attention after it dropped the ball with Taylor Swift ticket sales this week.
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The DOJ has reached out to venues and “players in the ticket market” in recent months to ask about the company’s practices, according to the NYT, meaning the probe predates this week’s debacle. DOJ spokesperson Arlen Morales declined to comment. Live Nation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many government officials have Live Nation and Ticketmaster in their sights as well. The attorneys general of North Carolina and Tennessee are each investigating Ticketmaster.
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Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the chair of the Senate subcommittee on competition policy, antitrust, and consumer rights, wrote a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino (pdf) on Wednesday expressing “serious concerns” about competition in the ticketing industry. And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted Tuesday that “Ticketmaster is a monopoly” and called for it and Live Nation to be broken up.
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guest · Nov 19, 2022

Ticketmaster yanked its explanation for the Taylor Swift ticket debacle
By Jay Peters @jaypeters - November 18, 2022

Ticketmaster has taken down its explanation for why buying a ticket to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour was an absolute disaster. The explanation, titled “The Taylor Swift Onsale Explained,” was live in two places on Ticketmaster’s website on Thursday and is now gone from both. But because the internet never forgets, you can still read it thanks to Google’s cache, and in case that fails, we’ve embedded it at the bottom of this article.
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In its post, Ticketmaster said that despite spending out 1.5 million invites to Verified Fans for Tuesday’s presale and putting 2 million fans on a waiting list, it saw “3.5 billion total system requests,” which the company said was four times its previous peak. Ticketmaster also shared a somewhat vague chart to demonstrate just how much traffic came in, but it gets the point across well enough.

Fans were furious on Tuesday as they had to put up with crashes and paused queues while attempting to buy tickets to the show, and Ticketmaster canceled the planned public ticket sale for Friday.
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guest · Nov 21, 2022

Ticketmaster blames ‘bot attacks’ for Taylor Swift ticket fiasco
By Jonathan Greig @jgreigj - November 21, 2022

The fiasco around Ticketmaster’s sale of tickets for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour has caused so much outrage among fans that the issue has now reached the halls of Congress and the Justice Department.
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On Friday, Ticketmaster released a statement attributing the ticketing issues to bots overloading their website alongside the pop star’s adoring fans.

“Historically, we’ve been able to manage huge volume coming into the site to shop for tickets, so those with Verified Fan codes have a smooth shopping process,” Ticketmaster said.
“However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4x our previous peak.”
Ticketmaster requires fans to register ahead of time in an effort to manage interest in high-demand shows. The feature is specifically designed to weed out bots and limit overcrowding. More than 3.5 million people pre-registered for Taylor Swift’s tickets ahead of time, the largest in Ticketmaster’s history.
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‘Waiting Room’ failure
Jason Kent, hacker in residence for cybersecurity firm Cequence, has been at the forefront of the effort to help retailers stop bots from buying up inventory.

Kent told The Record that Ticketmaster was correct in assessing that bot attacks had caused the issues but not in the way they think.

“Often these ‘waiting room’ type mitigations create the problem. Now you have 1.5 million people with established sessions on a website and its having to manage all of the login traffic and searching, then the waiting room code has to be sent,” he said. At the end of the process, a customer has to add the ticket to the cart and purchase. A bot, though, can get to this step much faster than a human ever could.
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When asked what kind of actors are behind the bots Kent said they are typically not cybercriminals but people interested in buying up as many tickets and reselling them. Anyone selling $5,000 Taylor Swift tickets on resale sites like StubHub are likely “botters,” he said.
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guest · Nov 23, 2022

Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift fiasco sparks Senate antitrust hearing
By Kris Holt @krisholt - November 23, 2022

Ticketmaster's chaotic handling of Taylor Swift's tour ticket sales has brought the company under increased scrutiny, including from lawmakers. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, have announced a hearing to gather evidence on competition in the ticketing industry. They have yet to confirm when the hearing will take place or the witnesses that the committee will call upon.
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Along with selling event tickets, the company owns and operates many venues and manages several major artists. Last week, it was reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been conducting an antitrust investigation into Live Nation for several months.

“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets. The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” Klobuchar said in a statement.
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Ticketmaster has said it's adhering to a 2010 consent decree it has with the DOJ that allowed its merger with Live Nation to go ahead. “Ticketmaster has a significant share of the primary ticketing services market because of the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system,” it added in a statement to Deadline.
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guest · Jan 24, 2023

Ticketmaster apologises for Taylor Swift tour sales fiasco
By Mark Savage & Jason Armesto - January 24, 2023

Ticketmaster has apologised to Taylor Swift and her fans during a US Senate hearing, months after its system was overwhelmed by demand for her Eras Tour.
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Thousands of 'Swifties' were unable to buy seats due to the issue.

"We need to do better and we will," Joe Berchtold, president of Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent company, told lawmakers on Tuesday.
A bot attack was responsible for "a terrible consumer experience", he said.
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Ticketmaster, which merged with Live Nation in 2010, has repeatedly faced criticism from fans and politicians, who say it has too much control over the live music market and artificially inflates the cost of tickets with fees and service charges.

Regarding the Swift tour, she added: "The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster's dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve."
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Swift herself said it was "excruciating" to watch fans struggling to get tickets, and that she had been assured Ticketmaster could handle the demand.

In its written testimony ahead of its Tuesday grilling by US senators, the company explained for the first time how its systems had been targeted by software "bots" used to illegally obtain tickets.
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guest · Jan 24, 2023

Senators slam Ticketmaster for reporting just one bot case to FTC despite Taylor Swift fiasco claims
By Jonathan Greig @jgreigj - January 24, 2023

Several U.S. Senators criticized Ticketmaster during a Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday for only reporting one case of bot abuse to the Federal Trade Commission despite previous claims that the company was dealing with unprecedented attacks by resellers using automated tools.
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Companies like Ticketmaster can report bot abuse to the FTC following the passage of the BOTS Act in 2016, which makes it illegal for companies to create systems that circumvent ticket sellers and resell tickets.

But Joe Berchtold, president of Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation, confirmed to senators that the company has only reported one incident involving bots since 2019.
Berchtold was appearing in front of the Judiciary Committee because of the outrage that resulted from Ticketmaster’s system crashing when tickets for musician Taylor Swift went on sale.
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Berchtold said the disruption was the result of “industrial scale ticket scalping” that has increased as more cybercriminals and ticket resellers now have access to powerful bots that can scoop up thousands of items far quicker than any fan can. He added that the ticket resale industry is now worth $5 billion each year, prompting steep escalations in bot use.

“We knew bots would attack [the Taylor Swift] onsale, and planned accordingly. We were then hit with three times the amount of bot traffic than we had ever experienced, and for the first time in 400 Verified Fan onsales, they came after our Verified Fan access code servers,” Berchtold said.
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BOTS Act scrutiny
Berchtold went on to say that the BOTS Act is “too narrow” and criticized the FTC for not enforcing the provision that makes it illegal to sell tickets obtained by bots. He also argued that companies like Ticketmaster should be able to bring civil actions to enforce the BOTS Act.

But much of Tuesday’s hearing hinged on the debate about whether Ticketmaster’s controversial merger with Live Nation made them a monopoly – something every other witness at the hearing said they believed.
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