According to a report in Rolling Stone, the Department of Justice is calling for concert and ticketing giant Live Nation to be broken up. It’s a remarkable claim in an antitrust lawsuit the department filed in New York Thursday morning, a day after a source familiar with the matter confirmed the suit with the magazine. The DOJ is joined by 29 states as well as the District of Columbia.
“The live music industry in America is broken because Live Nation-Ticketmaster has an illegal monopoly,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said in a statement on Thursday. “Our antitrust lawsuit seeks to break up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly, which will restore competition to the benefit of fans and artists alike.”
A DOJ suit has been one of the most anticipated potential legal actions in the live music industry since news of the regulators’ investigation first surfaced in 2022. Live Nation and Ticketmaster have faced significant scrutiny from fans, competing concert and ticketing companies, and regulators since the two companies merged in 2010, with critics saying the merger has made it difficult for other companies to compete in the live music space.
The DOJ itself pointed to several key areas in the complaint that the department said was indicative of the monopoly power Live Nation has maintained since the merger. It alleged that Ticketmaster used its exclusivity agreements with concert venues to block competing companies and lock down venues for long periods of time and “reduce competitive pressure.”
The Justice Department also claimed Live Nation threatened venues working with rival companies with losing the promoter’s concerts. “Sometimes Live Nation is bold and communicates this threat directly,” the DOJ said. “Other times, the expression of the threat may be implicit, but the meaning is self-evident.”
The DOJ also claimed that Live Nation had exploited a relationship with Oak View Group, a venue development and management company co-founded by the powerful music manager Irving Azoff, Live Nation’s former chairman. The department said the two companies “agreed to a competitive détente in concert promotions to avoid competition between the two companies over artists and tours.” It further alleged that “Live Nation exploits its long-term relationship with Oak View Group to flip venues to Ticketmaster, further cementing Ticketmaster’s power.” (A rep for Oak View Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The DOJ further claimed Live Nation has acquired smaller competitors to stifle competition.
Frustration toward the company—and toward the ticketing marketplace as a whole—was brought back into the national spotlight following the infamous on-sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which left thousands of Swifties irate due to technical difficulties and long lines as they attempted to secure tickets. The DOJ’s investigation into the company began prior to Swift’s on-sale.
Beyond the Justice Department, lawmakers including Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn, Richard Blumenthal and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have all called for heightened regulation toward Live Nation in recent years. Speaking with Rolling Stone last year, Klobuchar called out the volume of venues Ticketmaster serves, the exclusive deals the company carves out, and growing fees among other issues.
“That makes them a vertically integrated giant,” Klobuchar said. “They book the concert, sell the tickets and own the venue [and] that makes for little competition. And despite the consent decree which they agreed to extend, we don’t see the competition that we should.”
“If the reports are correct, the Justice Department is doing the right thing by bringing this suit against Live Nation,” Klobuchar said in a statement Wednesday regarding news of the upcoming suit. “This is about ensuring fair treatment for fans everywhere and reinvigorating competition in ticketing markets.”
“Anyone who has tried to buy a ticket from Ticketmaster knows this company has way too much power,” Senator Elizabeth Warren added in a statement. “The Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger empowered one dominant company to hike prices, tack on junk fees, bully artists, and even retaliate against venues who tried to stand up to them. The Justice Department is doing the right thing for consumers by moving to break up the company.”
Live Nation and its CFO Joe Berchtold were grilled for several hours during a Senate judiciary hearing in early 2023. “And the fact of the matter is that Live Nation/Ticketmaster is the 800-pound gorilla here,” Blumenthal told Berchtold during the hearing. “You have clear dominance [and] monopolistic control. This whole concert ticket system is a mess.”
The DOJ allowing Live Nation and Ticketmaster to merge over a decade ago was controversial at the time, putting the world’s largest concert promoter and ticketing company under one roof. Critics worried that such a combo would severely impact independent promoters and give Live Nation too much leverage.
This isn’t the first time the DOJ has had Live Nation in its crosshairs. The Justice Department reached a settlement with Live Nation in 2019 to amend a consent decree the company had been beholden to since the Ticketmaster merger in 2010, extending the decree through 2025. As part of the initial merger deal, Live Nation was required to ensure it wouldn’t retaliate against venues that don’t use Ticketmaster, though the DOJ alleged the company had violated the statute, claiming that it pressured venues to use the ticketing service for access to its concerts.
Live Nation has consistently denied the antitrust allegations, countering that the concert and ticketing businesses are more competitive than ever. They point to artists and not Ticketmaster who sets ticket prices and say that venues typically set the widely bemoaned fees typically accompany concert tickets.
Since the investigation launched, Live Nation put more resources toward focusing on other major issues within the live music industry, namely the predatory resale and scalping businesses that gouge the fans for significant markups. Last year, the company launched the Fair Ticket Act, advocating for state and federal lawmakers to enact legislation to let artists control their tickets, enforce the BOTS Act and end resale strategies such as speculative ticketing.
In a statement Thursday morning, Wall and Live Nation pushed back on the idea that the DOJ’s suit would change the industry. “The DOJ’s lawsuit won’t solve the issues fans care about relating to ticket prices, service fees, and access to in-demand shows,” Wall said. “Calling Ticketmaster a monopoly may be a PR win for the DOJ in the short term, but it will lose in court because it ignores the basic economics of live entertainment, such as the fact that the bulk of service fees go to venues, and that competition has steadily eroded Ticketmaster’s market share and profit margin.”
Wall called it “absurd to claim that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are wielding monopoly power.” “The defining feature of a monopolist is monopoly profits derived from monopoly pricing,” Wall said. “Live Nation in no way fits the profile. Service charges on Ticketmaster are no higher than elsewhere, and frequently lower.”
Wall said that the DOJ ignored numbers Live Nation had presented prior to the suit’s filing, stating that “the data conflicted too much with their preconception that Live Nation belongs in the ranks of the other ‘tech monopolists’ they have targeted.
“It is also clear that we are another casualty of this Administration’s decision to turn over antitrust enforcement to a populist urge that simply rejects how antitrust law works. Some call this “Anti-Monopoly”, but in reality it is just anti-business,” Wall said.
Following the suit, music industry groups such as the National Independent Venue Association weighed in. “NIVA is in full support of actions that level the competitive playing field for all those in the live music and entertainment industry,” Executive Director Stephen Parker said in a statement. “We hope that the suit filed today will ultimately produce a meaningful result that will benefit fans, artists, independent venues and festivals, along with the businesses that surround us across the country. We’ll be analyzing and evaluating the DOJ’s case in the coming days.”
