The Senate hearing discussing Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s practices has officially begun, and fans are reacting online.
Through a live stream, fans were able to watch it all go down and were delighted by the clever Taylor Swift references used by actual government officials.
“‘Ticketmaster ought to look in the mirror and say I’m the problem it’s me’ they are having so much fun in there please,” one fan tweeted, quoting one of the officials.
“Ticketmaster you’re going down in flames,” another fan said with a red heart.
Apparently, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar even said, “You can’t have too much consolidation. As an ode to Taylor Swift, I will say we know ‘all too well.'”
“To be honest, I had hoped as of a few months ago to get the gavel back, but once again, ‘she’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers,'” another official said in a video tweeted by a fan account.
“What is 2023 actually??” the fan said.
The hearing began Tuesday (Jan. 24) to address Ticketmaster’s 2010 merger with Live Nation and its effects on consumers trying to buy tickets to concerts, such as Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, which prompted the hearing.
According to The New York Times, Live Nation’s president, Joe Berchtold, claimed that the reason for the disastrous ticket sales was an onslaught of bots and added, “This is what led to a terrible consumer experience, which we deeply regret.”
“The only way to restore competition in this industry is to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation,” SeatGeek CEO Jack Groetzinger said.
The hearing was first announced after Swift’s tour sale in November 2022 by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee, who said, “Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets.”
Swift’s Nov. 15 sale resulted in mass chaos when the majority of fans were seemingly unable to get tickets, and the tickets were immediately being resold by scalpers for thousands of dollars, leading to a crashed site and a “sold out” pre-sale with no general public on-sale.
At the time, Swift said she was “pissed off” over the debacle.
The Eras Tour sale seemed to be the breaking point for many fans who have dealt with Ticketmaster’s increasingly high fees in recent years.
See more reactions to the Ticketmaster hearing, below:
Warning: Tweets may contain graphic language.