After its website collapsed and hundreds of Taylor Swift fans were left without tickets, Ticketmaster has already issued an apology, Yahoo News writes.
During a congressional hearing on its handling of the singer's ticket sales, Live Nation claimed that they might have done a "better job" by spreading out purchases over a longer period of time.
Live Nation Cites Bots As The Main Cause Of Ticketmaster Inconvenience
Millions of Taylor Swift fans visited Ticketmaster in November in an effort to secure tickets for what is likely to be the most anticipated tour of 2023.
When the time arrived, the website collapsed, making it impossible for verified customers to buy tickets to the singer's first schedule of gigs in five years.
After the event, the parent company of Ticketmaster, Live Nation, claimed that although 1.5 million people had signed up as legitimate consumers, over 14 million users had visited the site when tickets went on sale.
During the event, it was found that many of these accounts who queued for the ticketing of the tour were actually bots, according to Engadget.
Joe Berchtold, president and chief financial officer of Live Nation, stated to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that the company had "learned valuable lessons" from the Swift fiasco.
"In hindsight there are several things we could have done better - including staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets," he says.
Read More: Taylor Swift Fans Sue Ticketmaster Over Eras Tour Presale Ticketing Disaster
The Congress Wants To Tighten The Enforcement Of Consumer Laws
Senators were informed by Berchtold that Ticketmaster had three times the usual amount of bot traffic that day due to a cyberattack on the company's verified fan password servers, which made the situation worse.
He explained that even though the firm has invested more than $1 billion in ticketing technology since the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, mostly to combat fraud and scalping, it is still unable to control a large bot problem.
"We also need to recognize how industrial scalpers breaking the law using bots and cyberattacks to try to unfairly gain tickets contributes to an awful consumer experience," Berchtold claims.
He claimed that "industrialized scalping" was what caused the Taylor Swift controversy, but the executive wants Congress to take action to stop this from happening again.
With that, Berchtold urged the Congress to enlarge the scope of the BOTS Act to "increase enforcement," according to Engadget.
The regulation, which was enacted in 2016, forbids bypassing a website's security or technological safeguards in order to buy tickets.
Berchtold specifically demanded a prohibition on the use of phony URLs and an end to the resale of tickets prior to the public on-sale date.
Live Nation only contacted the FTC once about alleged bot activity, according to Berchtold, in late 2019 and early 2020.
He claimed that was the only occasion when they possessed the data required to cooperate with the commission and secure a prosecution.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal informed Berchtold that the corporation already has legal alternatives available to pursue scalpers who buy tickets using bots, which was in reference to the BOTS Act.
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