It used to be that the most important aspect of a U.S. Senator’s job was to cut ribbons and mingle with senior businesspeople as they tried to solicit funds for their campaign. Nowadays it seems whenever there is a public relations problem the Senators will call the company to try to put them on the spot to score a political point or two. Perhaps there is a balance between the two actions but one wonders.

In an article by Diane Bartz and Moria Warburton of Reuters, the Senators were actually interested in how does one buy a ticket to one of the most popular singers – Taylor Swift. Ms. Swift’s singles and albums when released jump to the top 10 and crowd the top ten for a number of weeks. After making an album, a singer traditionally goes on tour to promote greater sales and to make money for them. The selling of records or downloads has decreased for singers but touring generates income for the singer.

US Senators slammed Live Nation Entertainment’s lack of transparency and inability to block bot purchases of tickets, during a hearing to determine what caused the problems. Live Nation’s Ticketmaster has a 70% share of large concert sites.

Joe Berchtold, President and CFO of Live Nation, apologized to fans, the artist – Ms. Swift, and said we need to better. Some examples of next time is staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job of setting fan expectations for getting tickets.

The issue was more than 3.5 billion requests from fans, bots and scalpers overwhelmed the website.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, when things go well and most of the time they will, there are few critics. When things go badly, the critics will come out of the woodwork and express an opinion on multiple sites. What does the company do and how do they react? If you are satisfied with the way the company reacted, you can hold on, if you believe the company did not do the correct response, it is time to seek alternatives, for the response will happen again.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.