At the moment, everything is a disaster for Ticketmaster. They bungled the sale of Taylor Swift’s The Era Tour tickets so badly that they ended up canceling the general sale of them altogether. Swift is really unhappy with the situation, as she wrote today, “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.”
Now it turns out that while all of this was going down, parent company Live Nation Entertainment has been under investigation by the Justice Department.
The New York Times reports that according to “two people with knowledge of the matter,” the Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, to determine whether the company has abused its power in the live music industry. The investigation was apparently opened months before the Swift situation and is therefore not a response to it.
Per the NYT sources, the Department’s antitrust division has “contacted music venues and players in the ticket market, asking about Live Nation’s practices and the wider dynamics of the industry” and is trying to determine “whether the company maintains a monopoly over the industry.”
The Justice Department previously approved the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger back in 2010, on the condition that the company sell some parts of its business.
