Justice Department Investigating Ticketmaster Parent Company Amid Taylor Swift Tour Tickets Fiasco

Ticketmaster is under fire right now, and rightfully so, after the entertainment company site crashed from high demand for Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour.”

The presale of the tickets caused an uproar after Ticketmaster canceled the public sale of the tickets leaving fans to turn to resale markets, which are trying to sell the tickets for over $20,000. Now the Justice Department is seeking answers, investigating parent company Live Nation Entertainment’s practices.

Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow's public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.

— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022

According to The New York Times, the Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation of the company. The main investigation will be discovering if Ticketmaster “has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry” because it canceled general public sales, citing there wasn’t enough ticket inventory. The matter only raises a probable concern because the average person that is a fan of Taylor Swift no longer has access to tickets.

Tickets previously cost fans $49 and $449 for standard and $199 to $899 for VIPs during the pre-sale and now run over a whopping $20,000.

Taylor Swift took to Instagram to share a message about the ticket outage and said it was “excruciating” to find out.

“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse. … It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”

“And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.”

The Eras Tour will begin on March 17 in Glendale, Arizona.