Guardians of Industry

A corporation controls much of the gig industry, and lawmakers say music fans in pay the price.

Ticketmaster has come under intense scrutiny ever since it botched the rollout of tickets for Taylor Swift's tour at the end of Last year. Although the company has long been accused of anti-consumer practices, the backlash to Swift's debacle has caught the public eye. This week, the Senate held a hearing to determine whether Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, hold an unfair monopoly over the live music industry.

I spoke with Ben Sisario, who covers the music industry for The Times, about how Ticketmaster became so dominant.

Ashley: How did we get there Taylor Swift tickets to a Senate hearing?

Ben: It was a phenomenal pop culture moment. Taylor Swift, the world's biggest artist, has announced that she is going on tour for the first time in years. When there are millions of people trying to get a limited number of tickets, there will be a lot of unhappy people.

But Ticketmaster's website also had a lot of problems. Ticketmaster said its system is overwhelmed by bots, which are used by resellers to grab tickets before real fans and then resell those tickets to them at inflated prices. When people logged in to buy tickets, they were thrown into a digital queue with all the other fans – and all the bots. Some fans have said that even though they skipped the queue and added tickets to their cart, by the time they checked out the tickets were gone.

He broke the internet. A lot of people complained that they didn't receive a ticket and said that Ticketmaster didn't do their job. This caught the attention of politicians. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for the separation of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and Senator Amy Klobuchar announced a hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Fan complaints pointed to a long-standing criticism that Ticketmaster has no real competition. How did the industry come to be dominated by one company?

Live Nation Entertainment as we know it is the combination of two companies: Live Nation, the event promoter — which hires artists and organizes shows — and Ticketmaster, the ticket seller. These are usually separate jobs in the live music industry.

The whole world of concert promotion was small-scale and regional until the late 1990s, when it all rolled up and Live Nation became the greatest live music company of all time. Ticketmaster had been around for a long time, but it had never been about hiring artists to play shows. The two companies were already dominant in their respective sectors, and in 2010 they merged.

Usually with such large mergers, the government needs to ensure that the new company will protect consumers' interests. Were officials worried at the time about a monopoly?

To approve the merger, the Justice Department required the merged company to agree to certain rules . One was that Ticketmaster was not allowed to force venues into signing ticketing agreements by threatening to deny them access to Live Nation tours. They couldn't say, "If you don't use Ticketmaster, you won't get X-Y-Z visits next year."

But a few years ago , the Department of Justice investigated and found that Ticketmaster had in fact done this multiple times.

And at this week's hearing, the C.E.O. ticketing competitor SeatGeek said that when they present their services, the sites will be imp...