So Casually Cruel: New PSI Report Reveals How Ticketmaster's Monopoly Supercharges Prices & Fees for Consumers

[WASHINGTON, DC] - U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), released a Minority staff report today, entitled, "So Casually Cruel: How Ticketmaster's Monopoly Supercharges Prices and Fees," revealing new details about how Ticketmaster exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to grow its monopoly over live event ticketing and make concert-going unaffordable.

PSI's report concludes a years-long investigation into Ticketmaster and reveals new details about how the company leveraged its monopolistic control over ticketing and venues to drive up prices at every level. Today's report comes as the Department of Justice (DOJ) pursues a settlement with Live Nation Entertainment that leaves American consumers vulnerable to ongoing anticompetitive harms from the practices described in the attached report.

In a note from the Ranking Member in today's report, Blumenthal wrote, "The DOJ abruptly dropped its demand to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster after Ticketmaster hired lobbyists and fixers with deep ties to the Trump Administration, and instead settled for a meager fine, the divestment of a selection of venue booking agreements, and agreed to a few conditions on how it operates. This settlement will do little to protect musicians, their fans, and independent venues. Alarmingly, it may drive up prices and further cement Ticketmaster's monopoly. That's why today I am releasing the enclosed report of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which presents new information on the ways in which Ticketmaster abused its monopoly power to reap huge profits and push concert tickets farther out of reach for fans."

PSI's investigation spanned more than 112,000 pages of documents and seven years of comprehensive data compiled by Ticketmaster about its revenue and its 14 largest venues. A summary of PSI's key findings is below:

• Ticketmaster leveraged its control of the market to push artists to make tickets available on the resale market before they were available to the public, thereby driving up prices and increasing its own revenue.

• Although Ticketmaster claims artists and venues control ticket prices, the company pushed artists to aggressively expand the use of dynamic pricing, which resulted in steep price increases.

• Prior to highly publicized technical failures in 2021 and 2022, Ticketmaster executives knew that the company's focus on maximizing sales when demand was at its highest posed challenges for its technology.

Based on these findings, Blumenthal wrote to 27 state Attorneys General to urge them to reject the proposed settlement, and to stand for what the Department of Justice sought when they filed their complaint: breaking up Live Nation-Ticketmaster. Blumenthal's letters to state Attorneys General are available here.

In addition to calling on state Attorneys General to reject the proposed settlement, Blumenthal highlighted the following recommendations in PSI's report to curb the monopoly abuses PSI's investigation identified:

• Congress Should Enact a Price Cap on Secondary Sales: Congress should pursue statutory limitations on the prices of resold tickets. Such a measure could be narrowly tailored and would address glaring shortcomings in the current market that reward opportunistic actors instead of dedicated fans.

• Congress Should Enact Restrictions on Deceptive and Abusive Ticketing Practices: Congress should pursue legislation that improves transparency about the price and availability of tickets, including Blumenthal's Junk Fees Prevention Act and the BOSS and SWIFT Act.

The full text of PSI's Minority staff report is available here.

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