Sling- The Taylor Swift/Bad Bunny Debacles Illustrate a Big Monopoly Problem (And How To Fix It)
Senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley elaborates on a pertinent issue in the entertainment industry. Ticketmaster dominates the ticketing services, causing chaos with consumers attempting to purchase attendance to shows.
The recent debacle that saw Taylor Swift concert tickets surge as high as $22,000 has prompted the United States Senate to join antitrust authorities in reexamining the controversial merger that created Live Nation Entertainment (LNE), the corporation that mishandled ticket sales for the event. The deal, consummated in 2010, combined two already powerful firms —Ticketmaster, which dominated ticketing services for events, and Live Nation, which was the leading event promoter — into a near monopoly.
Critics predicted that LNE would abuse its market power in ways that hurt consumers, artists, and venues, and they proved to be right. Ticket prices, for example, have nearly tripled in the last two decades. In December, the company followed up its fiasco with Taylor Swift by botching ticket sales to a Mexico City concert by Bad Bunny, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, prompting calls for an investigation by Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López. Meanwhile, LNE has coerced artists and venues into using its ticket-selling services exclusively — a practice known as exclusive dealing that violates antitrust law.
Fortunately, it’s not too late for the federal regulators to remedy the mess. In addition to a lawsuit being developed by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can use some of its long-neglected – but recently awakened – powers to create market-wide rules targeting LNE’s use of exclusive dealing, a predatory practice that garners little attention with headlines focused on Ticketmaster’s prohibitive ticket prices and botched ticket sales.
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