Ticketmaster fees draw Klobuchar's attention in Senate hearing

Senators on Tuesday took aim at Ticketmaster’s fees, which average around 30 percent of each ticket’s price, questioning why they are so high and who sets them.  

“With Ticketmaster’s market power … why haven’t you done more to reduce fees?” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Joe Berchtold, Live Nation Entertainment’s president and chief financial officer, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Berchtold responded that the fees are set by the venues.

“The Live Nation venues have fees that are consistent with the other venues in the marketplaces and cover the cost of the operation of those venues,” Berchtold said. 

But Clyde Lawrence, a New York-based singer and songwriter, testified that venues owned or operated by Live Nation don’t take responsibility for the fees, which reached as high as 82 percent for one of his band’s shows last year. 

"I don’t know who is doing the fees, but we ask that question to the venues, and they say, 'Not only do we not choose what it is. We don’t even know what it is. We can’t even tell you what it’s going to be,'" Lawrence said. 

"Clearly there isn’t transparency when no one knows who sets the fees," Klobuchar responded.