Congress Investigating Live Nation over Astroworld

On December 22nd, Congress announced that the House Oversight Committee will investigate Astroworld promoter Live Nation related to their role in the festival and the tragedy that ensued.  The committee is launching a bipartisan investigation to the role they played in the event that left 10 dead and hundreds injured.  They requested information related to it by January 7th and will hold a briefing that will include Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino on January 12th.  In this post, I have included some information regarding what this means and what I am watching for in this.

 

What does this mean?

Do you remember seeing clips from hearings about Congress asking people questions about issues?  Two in particular that come to mind are hearings related to pharmaceuticals and the horribly uneducated questions related to social media.  This will be some sort of hearing like these, with questions related to Live Nation’s handling of Astroworld and previous incidents.

 

What might be investigated?

I expect most questions will be related to the Astroworld event this year itself.  In particular, I imagine most questions will relate to what they could have done to prevent the surge, stop the issue, shut down the event, speed up help, and address any safety concerns there were.  While the focus will absolutely be geared towards the recent event that got much public attention and impacted people across the country, there will likely be questions brought up related to past incidents and what kind of procedures Live Nation has implemented to (or hasn’t but should) prevent these kinds of events from happening.  According to the Houston Chronicle, there have been at least 750 injuries and 200 deaths worldwide from Live Nation events since 2006, so I would guess that this is something that will be brought up as a need for change.

 

What to watch for?

There are two things that I think will impact the result of this investigation:  a lack of awareness of industry or fanbases and how lobbying plays a role.  The awareness that I am referring to is something I seem likely considering how unaware those representing us were related to social media.  I expect their knowledge of the concert industry is even worse, so I am dreading hearing them ask why major issues are occurring at hip-hop or metal shows and not focusing on the size of the show being put on.  

While lobbying tends to make its way into political decisions, this could be an interesting situation since members of both parties openly apposed the handling of the festival. According to Open Secrets, a site that tracks money and lobbying in politics, Live Nation has historically donated almost entirely to democrats, though this past year rose $224,465 for democrats (82.2%) and $48,609 for republicans (17.8%).  Live Nation gave at least $5k in 2020 to campaigns for victorious candidates in President Joe Biden (D, $56.1k), Vice President Kamala Harris ($5.3k), Senators Jerry Moran (R, $20,5k), Jon Ossoff (D, $12.7k), Raphael Warnock (D, $10.6k), Cory Booker (D, $8.8k), and Tina Smith (D, $6.6k), and Representative Katie Porter (D, $5.3k).  They also rose money for losing candidates Donald Trump (R, $13.2k), Pete Buttigieg (D, $12.6k), Andrew Yang (D, $7.1k), Elizabeth Warren (D, $6.2k), Jaime Harrison (D, $6.1k), and Dan Rodimer (R, $5k), as well as to the North Florida Super PAC ($10k) and the Georgia Federal Elections Committee ($5.4k).  Open Secrets also discussed that the only active politician who has invested in Live Nation at some point is Representative Michael McCaul (R).  With all that said, I’m not sure it would be in the best interests of those who received donations from Live Nation to not impose a punishment, but I could see them pushing for one that is more for good publicity and realistically a slap on the wrist.  Something else to watch is that Representative Bill Pascell (D) has criticized the organization publicly for different issues since 2018 and was joined by Porter (ironically enough) in 2020 related to Covid refunds, so that is another subplot to watch.

 

What do I expect?

I do not have high hopes for any action that causes change to be levied against Live Nation.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some fine is levied since they feel like they have to (especially with support for Biden dwindling, likely to impact this year’s midterm elections results), though I don’t think they’ll do something that is a sizeable fine due to legal limitations and multiple individuals not wanting to lose potential funding.  I do expect that they will try to implement some sort of regulations to prevent something like this, but I expect that it would be something more along the lines of either regulations that would only impact certain genres or something that attempts to limit the size of events, though neither will be effective since it won’t actually focus on things leading up to issues at each event.  In short, I see this being more about politicians helping public perception than about doing what’s best for the country (not that I consider politics different than that, but beside the point).

 

 

Bonus:  What Went Wrong with Astroworld

Now that nearly 2 months have passed since the tragedy occurred, we have had plenty of time to analyze several aspects that went wrong.  While we will know with more certainty what happened once investigations are released, there are several things we can tell went wrong.  I have included some bullet points in order of what I think contributed most (I opted for bullets since I have discussed several of these on the “Groupie and Harmony” podcast previously).


 ·         The organizers were not prepared for this sort of emergency

·         The organizers ignored advice from local authorities related to safety measures

·         Nobody made the decision to pause the show (or seemed to know who was authorized to)

·         Security and medical staff were not trained to deal with their respective roles

·         Security was not positioned properly to deal crowd issues

·         Nobody told Travis Scott exactly what was happening

·         The fans irrationally disregarded human life

·         Festival organizers didn’t look into ways to calm the crowd down

·         Security and organizers were not bothered by a gate rush earlier in the day

·         Travis Scott’s past track record encouraged fans to be reckless

·         Drake joined Travis Scott unexpectedly, causing fans to go crazier

·         The number of people that were in the venue/area at that time

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