This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Sunday, February 19th, 2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Taylor Swift fans got a rude awakening when trying to buy tickets to her shows that anger has turned into

congressional and regulatory focus now on ticket master. Jennifer Huddleston is a

research fellow at the Cato Institute we discuss the problems with trying to reassure fans

that they'll get their tickets without considering the realities of supply and demand.

I go to a lot of live music events and when those events are in high demand I am

inevitably frustrated anytime I have to deal with Ticketmaster in terms of buying tickets.

And that just seems like a fact of life.

There was a show that I was going to attend that I just learned about and come to find out.

Almost all of the tickets were gone before it became possible for me to even log in to look at what was available. Most of those tickets were long gone.

And I think a lot of Taylor Swift fans recently learned this hard lesson about Ticketmaster and supply and demand.

Right, so there are a couple of things there. There's the natural supply and demand of tickets for a very popular artist,

whether it's the show you were trying to go to or the Taylor Swift show

that so many people experienced what was quite frankly a meltdown of the the ticket master website.

So artist you know can only perform so many acts there are only so many tickets

available in a particular venue and so there is that kind of

natural supply and demand. The question that's come up before Congress and that we've

now seen the Department of Justice investigating is is this just a natural case of there's too much

demand and too little supply, or is Ticketmaster actually engaged in some kind of anti-competitive

behaviors that are perhaps harming

consumers or even harming other aspects of the ticket market.

So I wonder about that because a few years ago we had heard about Clear Channel, which is now a company called I Heart Radio, which in addition to owning radio stations, in addition to owning

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