WASHINGTON – It must be exhausting always rooting for the Antitrust Hero.

Senators tore into the company that owns Ticketmaster Tuesday, accusing it of unfair, monopolistic practices that caused heartache for Taylor Swift fans who were denied tickets to the pop star’s Eras tour last fall.

In its first hearing of the new Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee scrutinized Ticketmaster’s 2010 merger with LiveNation, which witnesses said created a monopoly resulting in unfairly high prices for concert-goers.

“I believe in capitalism, and to have a strong capitalist system, you have to have competition,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). “You can’t have too much consolidation – something that unfortunately for this country, as an ode to Taylor Swift, I will say we know ‘All Too Well.’”

Matters came to a head this past November when Ticketmaster’s site crashed during a pre-sale for Swift tickets. The company blamed devoted “Swifties” and online bot attacks for overwhelming its servers and causing would-be concertgoers to lose tickets after waiting for hours in a virtual queue.

Ticketmaster later canceled the general sale for Swift tickets due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” The company had required fans to register for the pre-sale, and more than 3.5 million people did, a record for the company.

“While the bots failed to penetrate our systems or acquire any tickets, the attack required us to slow down and even pause our sales,” LiveNation CEO Joe Berchtold claimed Tuesday. “This is what led to a terrible consumer experience, which we deeply regret. We apologize to the fans. We apologize to Miss Swift. We need to do better, and we will do better.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) pointed out that similar targets of bot attacks, such as banks and power companies, don’t suffer meltdowns on the scale of what afflicted Ticketmaster.

“They have figured it out but you guys haven’t? This is unbelievable,” Blackburn said. “We’ve got a lot of people who are very unhappy with the way this has been approached.”

Berchtold also denied that Ticketmaster unfairly squashes competition and bloats ticket prices, blaming “industrial-scale ticket scalping” for the industry’s problems.

“We hear people say that ticketing markets are less competitive today than they were at the time of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger. That’s simply not true,” he said. “There are problems in the ticketing industry … many are the direct result of industrial-scale ticket scalping that goes on today – a $5 billion industry on concerts alone in the United States, fueled by practices that run counter to the interests of artists and their fans.”

Berchtold said the ticketing industry would like lawmakers to focus on the growing problem of scalping and prohibit other fraudulent practices, such as resellers offering tickets that haven’t officially gone on sale yet. He also acknowledged the industry should be more transparent about pricing and fees.

The CEO also insisted that artists and venues set ticket prices and service fees — and decide how many tickets will go on sale.

Berchtold’s answers frustrated lawmakers, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who said the company has “clear dominance” and called its practices “a massive monopolistic mess.”

“Ticketmaster had the temerity to imply that the debacle involved in pre-ticket sales was Taylor Swift’s fall because she was failing to do too many concerts,” he said. “May I suggest, respectfully, that Ticketmaster ought to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m the problem. It’s me.’”

Ticketmaster does admit to receiving tacked-on delivery, service and order-processing fees. Those extra fees make up about 27% of the ticket’s face value, with some fees going as high as 37% of face, according to a study published by the Government Accountability Office in 2018 and cited by Klobuchar Tuesday.

Through its merger with LiveNation, Ticketmaster owns about 200 major concert venues in the US. The world’s largest ticket seller also sells about 70% of tickets for all major venues – largely through exclusive contracts, according to a federal lawsuit filed by ticket-buyers filed last year. It also processes 500 million ticket sales each year in more than 30 countries.

Competitors, like Seat Geek CEO Jack Groetzinger, said Tuesday that even if Live Nation doesn’t own a venue, it prevents competition by signing multi-year contracts with arenas and concert halls to provide ticketing services. If those venues don’t agree to use Ticketmaster, Live Nation may withhold acts.

Kathleen Braddish, the American Antitrust Institute’s vice president for legal advocacy, told the committee legislation is needed to allow the Justice Department to better address predatory retailer practices. That’s because case law in vertical merger and monopolization cases have “narrowed and narrowed and narrowed the window for the enforcers to go after this kind of conduct.”

“Anything that will open that window that will give an opportunity for the enforcers to actually get at this conduct and this kind of merger activity is going to be what we need to restore competition,” she said.

Groetzinger was more blunt: “The only way to restore competition is to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation.”

Some lawmakers, including Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), suggested capping ticket prices or banning consumers from transferring their tickets to other people.

“Not every kid can afford $500 to go see Taylor Swift,” Kennedy said.

But Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) argued a ban on transferable tickets would hurt consumers and not address the problem of monopolization.

“A lot of people seem to think that’s somehow a solution; I think it’s ‘a nightmare dressed like a daydream,’” Lee said. “Generally speaking, this is not about scalpers – this is about the purchasers of the tickets themselves [who] may have perfectly legitimate reasons, whether it’s a change of plans or otherwise to resell tickets that they’ve already purchased.”

The Justice Department allowed Live Nation and Ticketmaster to merge as long as Live Nation agreed not to retaliate against concert venues for using other ticket companies for 10 years. In 2019, the DOJ found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated that agreement, and the department extended the retaliation prohibition to 2025.

Lee said Tuesday that the Justice Department is again investigating Live Nation after the Swift ticket fiasco, and Congress should explore whether the department should have allowed the original merger to go ahead.

“It’s very important that we maintain fair, free, open and even fierce competition,” Lee said. “It increases quality and it reduces price. We want those things to happen.”

With Post wires