US Justice Department sues Live Nation over ticket prices

Managing Editor of The Brag Media, Poppy Reid says she isn't entirely convinced of the claims US regulators are making against Live Nation.

Transcript

00:00 I mean, this all dates back to this 2010 when the merger happened and the DOJ had concerns

00:06 back then around it and they put in rules to stop any anti-competitive practices.

00:11 And then in 2018, they believe that Live Nation and Ticketmaster violated those rules and

00:17 then they started to investigate their practices.

00:19 They're really saying that fans and artists and venues are paying the price for Live Nation's

00:24 monopoly.

00:25 I'm not completely sure that that is true.

00:28 I think that there's been a lot of information that's come out from Live Nation of their

00:32 views on it.

00:33 They're talking about how those price hikes, it's due to supply and demand.

00:38 The top touring artists, the demand is in excess of the supply that we have.

00:43 And that Ticketmaster doesn't actually set the service charges that venues do.

00:47 And that promoters don't actually set the prices, artists do.

00:51 We look at that Taylor Swift concert and the issues that so many fans had.

00:56 And the real reason behind that was that there was a bot attack from the secondary ticketing

01:00 market, which made Ticketmaster have to pause everything on their end to deal with it, which

01:05 obviously then led to a lot of tickets being sold on the secondary to market for inflated

01:10 prices that was insane.

01:13 But I found that quite interesting, that correlation between this lawsuit and the Taylor Swift

01:18 ticketing issue, which was due to a bot attack.

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