2023-07-12 20:13:51
When on Tuesday Ticketmaster in France was forced to suspend the sale of tickets for concerts in the country of ‘The Eras Tour’ de Taylor Swift, the feeling of ‘déjà vu’ was inevitable. The same thing happened in November of last year. in USAwhere after selling 2.4 million tickets for the tour that returned the artist to the stage for the first time in five years, the platform collapsed. As argued by those responsible for him, he did so under the weight of an unmatched demand and before the assault of ‘bots’ employed by scalpers to accumulate the prized passes.
That fiasco, and the political weight carried by a figure like Swift, who has surpassed the sphere of music to become a cultural, economic and social phenomenon, was the protagonist of a hearing in January in the Senate. There, in a session where various senators achieved their viral moments by referencing Swift’s lyrics and titles, The monopolistic practices of Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, two giants that merged in 2010 to create a behemoth, were questioned.
Not only did something close to a miracle happen, bringing Republicans and Democrats together in trying to figure out what happened, trying to prevent it from happening again, and bolstering consumer protections. A wave of legislation also gained momentum, both at the federal and state levels, that may change some things.
wave of legislation
In each of the two Chambers of Congress, at least two bills have been presented that target the operation of the market for the sale and resale of tickets. The legislation also aims to improve the transparency of the companies, forcing them to inform the buyer in advance of the cost of commissions and other charges associated with the entry, surcharges that can represent up to 27% of the final price according to a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office.
At the state level, In Texas, ‘Save our Swifties’ has already become a law, a rule named in honor of the artist’s followers, which will impose fines on scalpers who use bots to accumulate tickets. And there are other proposals in California, Massachusetts or Minnesota, where the law that will force commissions to be detailed in advance in the price of tickets is titled ‘1989’, as the fifth of Swift’s ten studio albums.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have supported some of these proposals, but their powerful lobbying arm, which has been operating for years, has intensified opposition to others that would affect them more directly.. That of Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal, for example, would limit the long-term exclusive contracts that Ticketmaster maintains with large venues for ticket sales. And in the state of Washington, another Democratic senator ended up withdrawing in frustration a proposal that had put a stop to the practice of “dynamic pricing.”which companies use to raise prices when demand increases.
In any case, the debacle of Swift’s tickets, who in November expressed her anger at what happened and did not hide her “anger” at the fact that even those who got them “felt that they had to go through several bear attacks to achieve it”, It has renewed the focus on the entertainment giant, which was already investigated in 2019 by the Department of Justice for the potential violation of the conditions under which the merger was authorized.
#Taylor #Swift #Ticketmaster #debacle #Taylor #Swift #prompts #legislative