Taylor Swift
Dan Savickas
The author is with the Taxpayers Protection Alliance
The 118th Congress has barely begun. A wave of freshman representatives and senators are coming in with a mandate to help address a lagging economy, record inflation and an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape.
The federal government also just hit its borrowing limit and is approaching a fiscal cliff. January and February are months to get down to business.
Yet the full Senate Judiciary Committee held one of its first hearings of the year on another topic: last year’s Taylor Swift ticketing debacle.
For context, ticket presales for Ms. Swift’s “The Eras Tour” experienced a barrage of difficulties. “Eras” was the first tour for the singer since she toured back in 2018. Fans were stuck in massive online queues, with some waiting days and many not being able to get any tickets at all.
Things got so out of hand that Ms. Swift and ticket distributor Ticketmaster canceled the presale event. Given Ms. Swift’s popularity, national outrage promptly ensued. This is what led to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., calling this hearing, claiming consolidation in the ticketing industry led to the incident.
Claims by politicians like Sen. Klobuchar rest on the notion that Ticketmaster has been a monopoly in the ticketing space since its merger with global entertainment company Live Nation Entertainment in 2010. Sen. Klobuchar — who has attempted to bring antitrust action against a variety of American industries — is urging the Department of Justice to unwind the merger between the two companies.
However, the merger between Ticketmaster and LNE has already been thoroughly litigated. The 2010 merger agreement came about as part of a meticulously negotiated settlement with the DOJ to ensure the protection of consumers and competition. The joint entity is also operating under a consent decree with the DOJ so that they continue to uphold the terms of that merger and comply with regulatory standards.
Further, the joint entity still has a host of competitors like SeatGeek, Spotify, Vivid and StubHub. In fact, SeatGeek has agreements with several venues on the Eras Tour and was the primary vendor for five locations for Ms. Swift’s upcoming shows. There is adequate competition in the space.
The merger — and any alleged consolidation as a result — is not the issue.
However, what is clear to many Taylor Swift fans across the nation is that something clearly did go horribly wrong.
Eric Budish, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, points out some of the mistakes Ms. Swift made that led to the disaster. Dr. Budish notes that Ms. Swift likely played an outsized role in determining pricing, instead of using an algorithmic system based on actual demand.
According to Spotify, Ms. Swift brings in nearly 81 million listeners every month. That makes her the third highest-streamed artist in the world, behind only The Weeknd and Ed Sheeran. Given her massive popularity and the fact she hasn’t toured in a number of years, demand was naturally through the roof.
However, ticket prices did not reflect that demand. Looking at the resale market for “Eras” tickets show that is almost certainly the case. The original price range for tickets was $49 all the way up to $499. However, in the resale market, the cheapest price available is around $350, with prices ranging to an astounding $30,000.
Arbitrarily adding competitors to the market could not change this reality. The laws of supply and demand are fairly strict. Given how low the prices were, it was only natural the Eras Tour would face a wave of buyers – as well as bots and scalpers looking to make a fortune flipping the tickets in secondary markets.
In fact, antitrust action against entities like TicketMaster/LiveNation could increase the likelihood of another debacle like this.
Given how much supercharged demand played into causing the meltdown, it is unlikely that a bevy of smaller entities could have handled it any better. The merger between the two companies gave the united entity the capabilities to attempt to handle a tour of this magnitude. Breaking them up because of frustration will open the door to this happening to more artists across the country.
All in all, pinning this debacle on a 13-year-old merger is a classic case of misplaced rage. Holding an antitrust hearing about the “Eras” presale will end up missing the point entirely and distracting from any number of more pressing public policy priorities. This merger has been reviewed several times and cooler heads have clearly identified the mistakes that were made leading up to this massive inconvenience.
Despite Taylor Swift’s massive popularity, antitrust action to save her tour hardly qualifies as a pressing public policy priority.
Dan Savickas is the director of Policy at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. This article was originally published by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and made available via the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. And it was distributed to the News-Press by The Center Square, a nonprofit dedicated to journalism.
