WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Congress plans to hold a hearing on Ticketmaster, prompted by problems with Taylor Swift ticket sales this week and long-running issues like hidden fees, a key senator said on Friday.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate antitrust panel, did not give a date for the hearing but said it would be this year.
Ticketmaster has been sharply criticized for mishandling ticket sales for Swift’s 2023 tour, her first in five years. In the “presale” round on Tuesday, many fans faced site outages and long wait times as over 2 million tickets were sold.
Klobuchar said on MSNBC on Friday that the issue was bigger than the Swift ticket sales problems this week. “It’s about prices, hidden fees that are way too high. It’s about site disruptions,” she said.
Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the planned hearing. It has previously said the Swift ticket sale problems were caused by unprecedented demand, much of it by bots trying to buy tickets to resell.
(Reporting by Diane BartzEditing by Nick Zieminski)