Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said she plans to call a hearing on Ticketmaster following the chaos surrounding Taylor Swift concert ticket sales this week, as well as long-running issues linked to the purchasing service, like hidden fees.
Klobuchar did not give a date for the hearing but said it would be before the end of the year.
Ticketmaster created outrage among fans over its mishandling of sales for the pop star’s 2023 tour. On Tuesday fans were faced with site outages and long wait times as over 2 million tickets were sold.
Swift herself said watching the fiasco unfold was “excruciating,” writing on Instagram, “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 that they could.”
Friday on MSNBC, Klobuchar said the issue was bigger than just the Swift chaos, adding, “It’s about prices, hidden fees that are way too high. It’s about site disruptions.”
So far, Ticketmaster has not commented on the planned hearing. However, it has previously said the Swift chaos was caused by unprecedented demand, much of it by bots trying to buy tickets to resell.
