NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the state will be taking a closer look into whether further investigation into Ticketmaster's ticketing practices is necessary.
This comes after the number of outages and long wait times consumers endured while trying to purchase tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour on Tuesday.
“I know the Department of Justice and the states took a hard look at the Ticketmaster and LiveNation merger and secured a consent decree that was going to theoretically going to reduce the anti-trusts risks," said Skrmetti.
The Attorney General said with what happened on Tuesday, they are seeing a situation where people were trying to use a service and not getting the product they paid for, the product they were promised.
Skrmetti said this could be an indicator that there’s not enough competition in the market.
"We just need to take a closer look,” he added.
He continued, stating that with the fact that Swift had 10 songs at the top of the Billboard charts and received a lot of news attention, Ticketmaster would have been more prepared.
“You would think a company in that situation would recognize it was going to be an absolute flood of interest in tickets especially when they released the presale codes," he said. "You would think they would have a good idea of the volume that is coming.”
Skrmetti said if it’s a consumer protection violation and they can find especially where the problems are, they can get a court order that makes the company do better, to make sure the problems that happened yesterday don’t happen again.
"If it’s not consumer protection, it’s an anti-trust law that’s been violated — there is a wide range of options available. Some of them are very serious options that should not be thrown around lightly," Skrmetti said. "But if the facts and law call for it, there is a very wide range of potential consequences.”
The Attorney General reiterated that if people believe they have a fair chance to buy tickets, but there's some structural incentive where scalpers have a better opportunity, then the consumers have been deceived and that's a violation of consumer protection laws.
