Taylor Swift: accidental antitrust avenger?
Move over Karl Marx, it looks like Taylor Swift just radicalized the masses. Over the past few days there has been a lot of bad blood between Ticketmaster and enraged Swift fans over the disastrous rollout of tickets for the singer’s “Eras” tour. During the pre-sale process, which was only supposed to be open to around 1.5 million verified Swift fans, 14 million people, including bots, tried to get tickets. Pandemonium and heartbreak ensued. Things got even more heated on Thursday, the day before sales were meant to open to the general public, when Ticketmaster announced it was scrapping further sales due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand”. According to Ticketmaster, demand for Swift “could have filled 900 stadiums”.
This story isn’t really about how many fans Swift has, however, although she certainly has a lot. This story is more about how much power Ticketmaster has. The entertainment company merged with Live Nation in 2010 to create the parent company Live Nation Entertainment, and, since then, there have been concerns about how dominant it is in the space. Last year, for example, five Democratic House representatives sent a letter to the justice department asking it to look into Ticketmaster and Live Nation. “Ticketmaster has strangled competition in live-entertainment ticketing and harmed consumers and must be revisited,” the lawmakers said in their letter.
While concerns about Ticketmaster’s dominance aren’t new, it looks like the collective power of millions of irate Swifties means something might now be done about it. A number of politicians have chimed in to express their concern about the situation in the last few days. Tennessee’s attorney general, for example, said he was launching a consumer protection investigation into the company after his office was bombarded with complaints from Swift fans. The Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate antitrust committee, wrote a letter to Ticketmaster voicing “serious concern about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers”. The Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, announced he wanted to hear from people who had had trouble securing Swift tickets. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also chimed in to express her displeasure. “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with Live Nation should never have been approved, and they need to be reined in,” the congresswoman tweeted. “Break them up.”
It looks like the justice department may agree with AOC’s assessment. On Friday afternoon, the New York Times reported the DoJ had opened an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster, focused on whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry. According to the Times the investigation predates the Swift brouhaha, but it is certainly getting a lot more attention now.
Let’s hope that attention is sustained: the Swift ticketing debacle is just one high-profile example of the fact that the US has a major monopoly problem. Across numerous industries, monopolies are preventing healthy competition, which hurts consumers and lines the profits of a few chief executives. Remember the baby formula shortage earlier this year? That was partly due to the fact that just two companies – Abbott and Reckitt Benckiser – control about 80% of the US market. The US’s extortionate broadband and phone bill prices are another example of how monopolies hurt the average American. Here’s a statistic that will shock any European reader who is used to being able to choose from a number of broadband providers: a 2020 study found that 83.3 million Americans have only one broadband option. I live in a major US city and I only have two broadband options: both of which offer basically the same prices and services.
Monopolies are also one reason Americans pay ridiculous prices for healthcare: 80% of the country’s hospital markets are now reported to be “highly concentrated”; less competition means providers get away with charging higher prices. It is absolutely bonkers that the US continuously holds itself up as a bastion of capitalism when it cannot reasonably be said to have free markets. Even more bonkers is the fact that people aren’t rioting in the street about this every day. Although, thanks to Swift, they now might be.
Swift has had an incredibly impressive career. But you know what? If she gets people to sit up and pay attention to the disgraceful state of antitrust laws in the US, I reckon that will be her finest achievement.
California’s first lady refuses to fake orgasm during Weinstein trial
Harvey Weinstein, who is serving a lengthy prison sentence in New York, is currently in Los Angeles for his second criminal trial. The disgraced movie mogul’s first trial was full of misogyny and victim-blaming, and this trial is no different. Perhaps most notable is the disturbing nature of the questioning Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary film-maker, the wife of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and one of Weinstein’s most prominent accusers, has been subject to. At one point Weinstein’s attorney pressed Newsom on the precise nature of the sexual “noises” she’d made during the alleged assault by Weinstein, which she’d said were intended to get Weinstein to end the attack. In other words, she basically asked Newsom to demonstrate a fake orgasm. “This is not When Harry Met Sally. I’m not doing that,” Newsom replied.
US Senate takes crucial step toward codifying same-sex marriage
Twelve Republicans voted with all Democrats to advance the bill, which would ensure same-sex unions are enshrined in federal law.
Ben Shapiro says ‘a visitor from Mars’ would be opposed to same-sex marriage
The popular conservative commentator, who has sometimes been described as a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, couldn’t resist giving us all his profound thoughts on same-sex marriage. He doesn’t like gay people having rights, basically, and he doesn’t think hypothetical aliens would either.
Slovenia introduces marriage equality
Our extraterrestrial friends on Mars are presumably not pleased with this news.
A historic number of women in the US will be state governors next year
Nearly 25% of the governors will be women, including in several states that have never elected a woman to their top office before.
Lack of women at Cop27 negotiations raises concern
BBC analysis has found that women make up less than 34% of country negotiating teams at the UN summit in Egypt. Some teams were more than 90% male.
Boots and balls made for men an injury risk to female soccer players
Soccer boots, for example, don’t account for the fact women have differently shaped feet, heels and arches from men.
The week in patent-archy
All Mariah Carey wanted for Christmas this year was an approval from the US Patent and Trademark Office to trademark “Queen of Christmas”. It seems, however, that her efforts to crown herself the Yuletide queen have been thwarted. Elizabeth Chan, a Christmas music singer dubbed “The Queen of Christmas” in a 2018 New Yorker profile, successfully opposed the trademark.
“It takes a lot of people to help usher in the season, and for one person to outrightly own that is wrong,” Chan said. She has a point. Attempting to create a seasonal monopoly isn’t very Christmassy of you, Mariah.
