Senator John Kennedy Has Blunt Message For Taylor Swift And Bruce Springsteen

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At Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) urged musical artists to cap their ticket prices. A senator has called on musical artists to limit the amount they charge for concert tickets.

Senator Kennedy in his Senate remarks said:

You want to hold down prices and cut out the middlemen and middlewomen. You want to cut out bots and make them non-transferable or transferable only at face value.

Couldn't a major artist have Bruce Springsteen say whose music I love and then say, "Look, I've got market power?" "I'm going to set this price for the ticket, I'm going to set this price for the service fee, and it's going to be non-transferable." Couldn't a large corporation with market power do that?

If you care about the consumer, you're going to hold the price down; you're going to cut out the middle man. Now we still have the problem of some of your colleagues saying you're making too much money.

Some of them say—I hear them say—you're making too much money, and we want some of it. I hear others saying you're making too much money, and that's hurting the consumer because those fees get passed on.

If you care about the consumer, set a price cap, eliminate bots and middlemen, and give the consumer a break.

Not every kid can afford to pay $500 to see Taylor Swift perform. and I'd like to see Miss Swift, Mr. Springsteen, or some of the other major artists step up and say, "You know what, we're going to support non-transferability, and we're going to cap the fees that are added on here."

And we're going to make sure that the artist has paid a fair price. Everybody else can make a profit, but you can't make an obscene profit, especially the scalpers.

If we do that now, we've done something; we've gone beyond how many lawyers can dance on the head of a pen and whether the FTC ought to be involved, which we know full well will happen sometime in the next century, and whether something's a technical violation of the antitrust law, which we have to litigate.