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 said the company’s defenses are “second to none.”
Blackburn pushed back, calling Wall’s remarks “very dismissive.” Ticketmaster, she added, appears to be more “focused on preserving their business model” than addressing the crisis.
“If your local utility has figured out how to build a system to block cyberattacks, one would think that Ticketmaster could figure this out,” Blackburn said Thursday. “So therefore, it shows you there’s an unwillingness from Ticketmaster to really be serious about this.”
Live Nation said Thursday that Blackburn’s characterization was “wrong.”
“The real threat to fans is predatory, industrial-scale scalping. We’re in a constant arms race with bad actors using increasingly sophisticated ticket-harvesting technology,” a Live Nation spokesperson said in a statement.
“While we’ve invested more in anti-bot defenses than anyone combined, criminals are chasing their share of a $15 billion resale industry.”
Blackburn, who was set to speak on the Senate floor on Thursday about her takeaways from the hearing, said the price cap proposal had “really received some support” in the upper chamber of Congress.
The senator also cosponsored the MAIN Event Ticketing Act, which would boost enforcement of an existing federal law restricting automated ticket sales and force Ticketmaster to report successful bot attacks to the FTC.
Ticketmaster has faced intense scrutiny from Congress in large part because it controls a massive share – up to 70% to 80%, according to some experts – of the primary ticket sale market.
Meanwhile, Congress has stepped up its review of algorithmic pricing beyond the entertainment industry. Late last year, a bombshell study accusing Instacart of implementing “dynamic pricing” on grocery deliveries sparked a wave of concern on Capitol Hill.
Blackburn called the rise of algorithmic pricing a “very dangerous thing” for consumers and said she will pursue ways to crack down on the practice.
The senator expressed alarm about instances in which algorithms have tweaked prices based on a customer’s ZIP code or purchase history.
“Whether it is something you’re purchasing at the grocery store or a flight or a sports event ticket,” Blackburn said, “it is really an unfair and deceptive practice.”
