Joe Berchtold, president and chief financial officer of Live Nation Entertainment Inc., left, and Jack Groetzinger, chief executive officer of SeatGeek Inc., are sworn in to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. Berchtold will tell the committee that the concert promoter learned valuable lessons from the debacle that forced its Ticketmaster unit to cancel public sales for a Taylor Swift tour when its site crashed amid massive demand.
“The monopoly needs to be broken up,” said Penny Harrison, a Taylor Swift fan who protested outside the U.S. Capitol during Tuesday’s hearing. “We want some answers from Ticketmaster. What Ticketmaster is doing should not have been allowed in the first place.” Berchtold blamed what’s known as bots for causing them to slow down and pause sales during the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco.“We were then hit with three times the amount of bot traffic that we’d ever experienced,” said Berchtold. “This is what led to a terrible consumer experience which we deeply regret.”“You can’t blame bots for what happened with Taylor Swift,” said Jerry Mickelson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Jam Productions, LLC.