CNN
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The Justice Division and a number of other states are anticipated to file a lawsuit as quickly as Thursday in opposition to Stay Nation Inc, citing alleged antitrust violations at the very least partly as a result of market dominance of the corporate’s Ticketmaster unit, an individual briefed on the deliberate authorized motion stated.
A profitable antritrust case may probably result in sweeping adjustments available in the market for reside occasions – an business that got here underneath intense scrutiny in 2022 after glitches at Ticketmaster blocked thousands and thousands from buying tickets for Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour.
For a lot of critics of Stay Nation, the Swift debacle revealed how a scarcity of competitors has led to harms starting from poor customer support to complicated pricing to costly ticketing fees to restrictions on ticket resales — amounting to what many shoppers complain of as loss of life by a thousand cuts.
The fiasco led lawmakers to grill a top executive of Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, in January final yr over the corporate’s practices.
Through the three-hour listening to, senators pressed Stay Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold and another witnesses on whether or not his firm was too dominant within the business, thereby harming rivals, musicians and followers.
“I wish to congratulate and thanks for a fully beautiful achievement,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal stated to Berchtold. “You’ve got introduced collectively Republicans and Democrats in a fully unified trigger.”
Nor are music followers and lawmakers the one ones to criticize Stay Nation through the years – loads of musicians and different popular culture figures have as properly.
Nation star Zach Bryan dropped a shock album on the finish of 2022 titled, “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Stay at Purple Rocks).”
Within the social media post asserting the album on Christmas Eve, Bryan wrote that it “appears there’s a huge subject with truthful ticket costs to reside exhibits recently.”
Even the long-running animated present “The Simpsons” has piled on, with rapacious capitalist Mr. Burns sneering in a single episode to his lackey Mr. Smithers: “You laughed once I purchased Ticketmaster. ‘Nobody’s going to pay 100% service cost.’”
This text has been up to date with extra context.
CNN’s Brian Fung, Samantha Kelly, Hannah Rabinowitz and Dan Heching contributed reporting.