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The US Department of Justice is seeking to split up Live Nation-Ticketmaster in an antitrust lawsuit that accuses it of abusing monopolistic power in the live entertainment industry.
The DoJ alongside 30 US state and district attorneys-general on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment, alleging they illegally maintained monopolies in ticketing and concert promotion and that their “exclusionary conduct” harmed live concert venues.
As a result of the alleged anti-competitive conduct, “fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services”, Merrick Garland, US attorney-general, said in a statement on Thursday. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
The civil lawsuit comes as discontent around the group, which was created by the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, has grown over the years among fans, competitors, artists and US lawmakers accusing it of abusing its dominant market power. Frustration was exacerbated after a fiasco during the ticket sale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2022, when Ticketmaster’s website was overwhelmed by massive demand.
The DoJ alleged that Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s misconduct strengthens what the group calls its “flywheel” business model. Prosecutors said revenue from sponsorship and fans’ concert fees was used to “lock up” artists in exclusive promotion deals. A “powerful cache of live content” was then used to keep venues in long-term exclusive ticketing agreements, “thereby starting the cycle all over again”, the DoJ said.
“The live music industry in America is broken because Live Nation-Ticketmaster has an illegal monopoly,” Jonathan Kanter, head of the DoJ’s antitrust unit, said in a statement.
Dan Wall, executive vice-president for corporate and regulatory affairs at Live Nation Entertainment, said in response to the case that it was “absurd to claim that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are wielding monopoly power”.
He said the lawsuit “ignores everything that is actually responsible for higher ticket prices, from increasing production costs to artist popularity, to 24/7 online ticket scalping that reveals the public’s willingness to pay far more than primary tickets cost”. Wall added that “every year, competition in the industry drives Live Nation to earn lower take rates from both concert promotion and ticketing”.
According to the DoJ, Live Nation directly manages more than 400 musical artists and controls about 60 per cent of concert promotions at major US venues. It also owns or controls more than 60 of the top 100 amphitheatres in the US. Through Ticketmaster, the group also controls about 80 per cent of top concert venues’ primary ticketing, prosecutors said.
The large group of bipartisan states joining the lawsuit includes California, New York, Florida and Texas, according to senior DoJ officials.
The DoJ in 2010 gave the green light to the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation subject to a 10-year settlement agreement with provisions including barring retaliation against venues that choose alternative ticketing or promotional services.
In 2019 it modified and extended the agreement, saying the group had “repeatedly” violated the initial deal.
Wall said the group was “another casualty of this administration’s decision to turn over antitrust enforcement to a populist urge that simply rejects how antitrust law works”.
It is the latest high-profile monopoly case filed by the DoJ’s antitrust unit, which under Kanter has adopted a tougher enforcement stance. He is among a new generation of progressive officials appointed by US President Joe Biden, who argue that anti-competitive conduct has snowballed across the US economy due to decades of lax enforcement.
