Taylor Swift becomes antitrust Anti-Hero

DOJ investigating Ticketmaster after Swift tour crisis

By Rae Levy Contributing Writer

Ticketmaster is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice’s antitrust department after tickets to Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” sold out almost immediately, and many Ticketmaster users experienced difficulties on their website. Most people were quick to blame Ticketmaster, including Swift herself.

When Swift announced she would be going on tour this spring and summer, she used the Ticketmaster platform to sell her tickets, just like almost all major performers do. Not only were Swift’s tickets hard to get, they were also super expensive. She sold 2.4 million tickets in 2 days with an average price of $215. On resale sites such as StubHub, tickets are now in the thousands, with some tickets listed as high as $9,000 each. Clearly, this made the tickets extremely difficult for an average person to purchase.

That difficulty highlighted Ticketmaster’s failure to prepare for the huge number of people who tried to purchase tickets for Swift’s tour. It also shined a light on the company’s near-complete control over the ticket market.

Ticketmaster (a ticket selling company) and Live Nation (an artist management company) merged in 2010, forming Live Nation Entertainment. The Justice Department approved the merger, even though at the time it was controversial and received pushback from many, including the National Consumers League, who saw the merger as a sign Live Nation and Ticketmaster would form a monopoly and dominate the music concert industry. According to many music fans, that is exactly what has happened.

The Department of Justice’s antitrust division was already investigating Ticketmaster before the Taylor Swift fiasco. The antitrust investigation will consider whether Live Nation has a monopoly over the ticket-selling industry, something opponents of the merger back in 2010