Blissful Thanksgiving, Stay Nation: Weeks after reporting its “largest quarter ever,” the Ticketmaster dad or mum has been slapped with a subpoena from the U.S. Senate.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, who serves as chairman of the Everlasting Subcommittee on Investigations, took to social media to elaborate upon the explanations behind the subpoena. A longtime proponent of regulatory laws focusing on Stay Nation in addition to Ticketmaster, the Connecticut lawmaker is the co-sponsor of the Unlock Ticketing Markets Act and beforehand criticized the alleged “clear excesses and abuses of Ticketmaster.”
“Stay Nation has egregiously stonewalled my Subcommittee’s inquiry into its abusive shopper practices—making the subpoena essential,” the senator defined on Twitter/X. “This subpoena calls for that the corporate promptly adjust to our request for paperwork important to know its enterprise practices.”
In response to Reuters, these important paperwork contain tickets’ pricing, charges, and resale specifics, whereas the subpoena’s cowl letter, dated November sixteenth, claims that Stay Nation didn’t adjust to data requests courting again to March.
(For extra context concerning the doc request, January had seen Stay Nation CFO Joe Berchtold face a bipartisan congressional grilling, which had itself arrived on the heels of the much-publicized Eras Tour pre-sale fiasco.)
Notably, Stay Nation EVP of company and regulatory affairs Dan Wall pushed again in opposition to the senator’s subpoena and evaluation of the scenario.
“Stay Nation has been cooperating with the Senate Subcommittee’s investigation for months and has under no circumstances been ‘stonewalling,’ Wall penned in an almost 400-word response. “We now have produced paperwork on each topic that the Subcommittee raised, not solely in its preliminary letter however in subsequent conversations. We now have actually produced almost 10,000 pages of paperwork, together with greater than 2000 emails, dozens of business agreements, and voluminous different supplies.”
The “extremely delicate consumer data” sought by the subcommittee “addresses plainly confidential topics corresponding to how a lot cash artists make from their excursions,” per Wall, who additional maintained that Stay Nation had “advised the Subcommittee repeatedly that we’d produce such data with regular confidentiality protections.”
“The Subcommittee has refused to offer any confidentiality protections in any respect,” proceeded the Stay Nation exec of about 10 months. “That has led to an deadlock that left us with no procedural choice apart from to say no to provide the third-party confidential data at challenge. … The Subcommittee responded by issuing a subpoena, which was anticipated. It’s only in a subpoena enforcement motion that Stay Nation can assert its rights to guard the confidentiality of this data.”
Greater image, the subpoena has entered the media highlight amid a reportedly intensifying Justice Division antitrust investigation into the Stay Nation-Ticketmaster merger. Upon unveiling Stay Nation’s aforementioned report Q3 financials, Berchtold took intention on the timing of associated experiences and made clear that the corporate didn’t imagine there was “any actual information” regarding the DOJ probe.