DOJ reportedly investigated Ticketmaster before Taylor Swift debacle

The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, to determine whether the company abused its power in the live music industry. The investigation has reportedly been ongoing for the past several months. The New York Times reported on the investigation after fans of Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen had a hard time buying tickets for the artists' tours.

The DOJ's Antitrust Division questioned concert venues and ticketing market participants about Live Nation's industry and practices, according to the report. The agency is reportedly investigating whether Live Nation has a monopoly in live music.

The company owns and/or operates numerous venues, including the House of Blues, and hosts festivals like Lollapalooza and Download. It sells tickets for these venues and events through Ticketmaster. Live Nation also manages dozens of notable artists.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 after gaining DOJ approval. The agency imposed certain conditions on the deal, such as Live Nation having to sell parts of its business. For a period of 10 years, Live Nation was banned from threatening to drive tours away from venues that do not use Ticketmaster. In 2019, the DOJ determined that Live Nation violated this condition and extended the clause period of the merger agreement until 2025.

To bring things up to date, the Swifties (and the bots) crashed Ticketmaster on Tuesday as they tried to secure tickets for the megastar's first tour in five years during a presale. Ticketmaster said a load of over 3.5 billion system requests caused havoc.

"The site was supposed to open to 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans," Greg Maffei, CEO of Live Nation's largest shareholder, Liberty Media, told CNBC . "We had 14 million people on the site, including bots, who aren't supposed to be there."

Fans lined up for hours and when they were finally able to select a seat, many still couldn't get tickets. In many cases, tickets were essentially ripped from customers' hands as they tried to put them in their basket. A general sale for the remaining tickets was scheduled to take place on Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled it "due to extraordinarily high demands on the ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet this demand".

The chaos has led to calls to disband Live Nation, including from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The senses. Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar have expressed concern over "the state of competition in the ticketing industry", as