Ticketmaster and Live Nation are facing criticism about their operations after seeing site failures during the presale last week for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras tour.
The Ticketmaster website crashed or froze as thousands of Swift fans attempted to buy presale tickets for The Eras Tour, Swift’s first tour since 2018, on Tuesday. Ticketmaster said in a statement on Thursday that “unprecedented traffic” on their site was due to “historically unprecedented demand.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) wrote in a tweet that Ticketmaster and Live Nation should be broken up.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up,” he said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) expressed concerns about Ticketmaster in an open letter to Live Nation Entertainment.
“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services,” she wrote. “That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”
