Here are four takeaways from the hearing, which was called after Ticketmaster had problems in November selling tickets to Taylor Swift’s coming tour, leaving millions of frustrated fans unable to buy tickets. “You leverage market power in one market to get market power in another,” he said. Democrats and Republicans alike criticized Live Nation and discussed possible remedies including new legislation and even whether Live Nation-Ticketmaster, merged since 2010, should be broken up. Mr. Berchtold acknowledged that the company could have handled Ms. Swift’s tickets differently, such as spreading out the sales over a longer period of time. Live Nation operates under an agreement called a consent decree, which was required by the Justice Department to approve the companies’ merger, and in 2020, the department extended it by five years.

Source: Daily Nation January 24, 2023 20:37 UTC