Breaking the Ticket Monopoly: How Taking on LiveNation Unites a Divided America
The Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, owner of Ticketmaster, marks an important development in the broader push to ramp up antitrust enforcement. In an era marked by intense political division, the cause of reining in Ticketmaster is winning wide support from both sides of the aisle. It turns out that Ticketmaster, a company almost no one has anything nice to say about, may be the perfect target at this moment of stark political division.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster are widely disliked. 78% of Ticketmaster customers don’t recommend the company — almost as bleak as the 82% negative customer rating of cable company Spectrum, the largest player in another industry that gets no love. And the fact that Ticketmaster dominates ticketing, while Live Nation manages nearly 400 artists and operates the biggest entertainment venues in North America means you’re probably one of their customers yourself. If you ever enjoy any live entertainment, from music to performing arts to sports, you’ve probably had to deal with their punitive fees and engineered ticket scarcity.
For decades, artists and performers have loudly complained about the damage the fees and policies of Ticketmaster — whom David Letterman has called “beady-eyed, bloodthirsty weasels” — wreak on the entertainment industry. Earlier this year, 250 artists — including significant musicians and bands like Billie Eilish, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, Chappell Roan, Cyndi Lauper, Dave Matthews, Diplo, and Lorde — signed an open letter calling for Congress to act. Pearl Jam filed a formal antitrust complaint against Ticketmaster thirty years ago. The Cure’s Robert Smith raised such a stink last year about Ticketmaster’s fees on tour tickets that they agreed to a partial refund.
Public pressure doesn’t always translate into support by lawmakers, who have their own political priorities that may not line up with yours. But this time it’s different. 30 state Attorneys General joined the DOJ’s lawsuit, including the Republican AGs of states like Arkansas, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. It’s extremely rare for Ken Paxton of Texas and Tish James of New York to agree on anything, but they agree on this.
It probably helps that Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who’s leading the charge for the DOJ, is respected across the aisle. He was confirmed by a broad bipartisan majority and Jeff Landry, Governor of Louisiana and the state’s former AG, called Kanter “one of those unusual nominees whose philosophy on antitrust appeals to both the Left and the Right.”
It’s also important to factor in that this isn’t the first time Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been on the hook for illegal activity.
In 2010, the companies accepted restrictions to protect market competition under a consent decree when they merged in 2010. However, the terms of the decree, approved by Barack Obama’s DOJ, ultimately failed to hold the companies’ abuses accountable. It’s for this reason that the Trump DOJ worked to rein in Ticketmaster, helping set the stage for the antitrust suit filed this year. In 2019, the Trump DOJ found that Live Nation had violated the original consent decree, and chose to assess a fine and extend oversight by five years. In 2020, in a criminal action — again, filed under Trump — Ticketmaster admitted to industrial espionage and paid a fine.
Live Nation has spent more than $6 million since 2018 lobbying Washington, but it doesn’t seem to be achieving much. When public anger spiked after Ticketmaster’s disastrous mishandling of Taylor Swift’s 2022 tour, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee roundly eviscerated Live Nation’s president Joe Berchtold in a bipartisan January 2023 hearing led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Rarely in recent memory have Senators from both parties been so united on anything. “This is all the definition of monopoly,” Klobuchar pronounced. “This is unbelievable,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) of the excuses the witness made under oath. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) called the Taylor Swift episode a “debacle.”
At a point in our political history when almost nothing can get through Congress without facing bickering and obstruction, it’s good to know that some things can bring our lawmakers together. And in finally taking action against Ticketmaster after more than a decade of mounting public pressure, mounting evidence of illegal activity, and mounting bipartisan resolve in both houses of Congress, the DOJ is fighting a battle sure to be supported across party lines.
