Senator rips Live Nation for 'very insufficient' response to online ticket bot allegations
Sen.Marsha Blackburn blasted Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation on Thursday for its “very insufficient” response to allegations that executives knowingly “turn a blind eye” to automated bots that force customers to pay exorbitant prices.During a Wednesday Senate hearing on online ticket scalping, the Tennessee Republican cited an internal email in which a Ticketmaster executive admitted that the company “turn[s] a blind eye as a matter of policy” when bots exceed ticket purchase limits.Live Nation exec Dan Wall testified that the email was “taken very much out of context” and said the company was doing all it could to fight bots.
Blackburn rejected that explanation in an interview with The Post on Thursday, stating “that was the context and he knows that.”“I think that Mr.Wall did not do Ticketmaster/Live Nation any favors yesterday,” she said.
“There is bipartisan frustration with how they have worked with Congress.”The senator said she will look to hold executives accountable if they are determined to have lied to Congress.She chaired the Senate Commerce Committee’s hearing, which also included appearances by musician Kid Rock.Saying fans and artists alike are being “screwed” under the status quo, he called on Congress to enact a price cap on resold tickets.The bombshell email flagged by the Tennessee Republican surfaced in a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster and Live Nation of reaping massive profits by allowing bots to snap up and illegally resell millions of tickets to customers.Last September, a source close to the situation said the company could be on the hook for “potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars” in fines.Wall testified that Ticketmaster was doing all it could to combat bots and had “already made substantial progress,” but the platform was “being attacked by hundreds of millions of bots every day” and unable to completely stamp out the problem.
Despite that, Wall s...