President Trump is Right to Sue Ticketmaster LiveNation
In mid-November, JTN Network announced it would be purchasing Human Events, the vaunted conservative publication. But they did not buy them for their news output: instead, the new owners announced that Human Events “will be re-imagined into a large virtual and live events platform with ticket, music, and movie sales and daily event programming for politics, news, sports, and entertainment.” JTN’s ownership said they saw “a substantial opportunity to build a competitor to the Live Nations and Ticketmasters of the world that showcases the talent and values of middle America rather than the disconnected elitism of Hollywood.”
This seems somewhat baffling at first. Human Events – published since the 1940s – was purchased essentially for its name, just so JTN could compete with Ticketmaster. It’s a move that seems over the top…that is, until one realizes how thoroughly Ticketmaster has monopolized the event space.
By now, most Americans know the struggle. You see your favorite band coming to town for a concert and look for tickets online, only to find that the only site selling them is Ticketmaster. You settle and begin the process of buying your ticket. But as you click, what started as an $85 ticket has now ballooned to $120 thanks to deceptive pricing and hidden fees. Suddenly, what was going to be a great night out with friends will be a night spent alone, missing out.
How did we get here? In 2010, the DOJ negotiated a consent decree with Live Nation and Ticketmaster mandating that the companies would be “expressly prohibited from retaliating against any venue that considers or works with another primary ticketing service.” That promise did not last long: in 2018, AEG, a competitor, stated that multiple venues were informed they would lose concerts unless they used Ticketmaster's services.
In 2019, the DOJ found that the company violated the consent decree and continued to blacklist venues from its services. As their deceptive pricing and harmful business practices grew, so too did their market share, now sitting at 80%. Holding this monopoly allowed Ticketmaster to haul in $16.4 billion in mandatory fees between 2019 and 2024, made possible by “triple-dipping”. This is a process in which the company collects fees at three different points: when the ticket is bought, when it is listed for resale, and when it is purchased again.
In 2024, Americans spent $9.5 billion on tickets to the top 100 pop music tours, up 71 percent from 2019. With no sign of slowing down, taking action now is crucial. Fortunately, President Trump has already shown that he cares.
In March, he signed an executive order directing the FTC to “rigorously enforce the Better Online Tickets Sales Act… and collaborate with State Attorneys General or other State consumer protection officers on enforcement of the Better Online Ticket Sales Act”. The Act, signed into law in 2016, essentially banned the sale of tickets bought using online bots and is enforced by the FTC. Additionally, the order directed the FTC to evaluate current anti-competitive behavior in the secondary ticketing market.
In September, the FTC filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster and Live Nation, alleging various types of misconduct. The FTC alleged that Ticketmaster used a “bait-and-switch” pricing scheme to show customers one price at the start of the buying process, only to hit them with a 40% price increase due to hidden fees. They also alleged that, even though musical artists and performers rely on ticket limits to keep their shows open to as many consumers as possible, Ticketmaster repeatedly allowed brokers to exceed the limit, in some cases by thousands of tickets. Finally, due to violations of the BOTS Act, Ticketmaster has generated hundreds of millions in revenue through ignoring ticketing and pricing rules. The lawsuit notes that a Ticketmaster executive said they “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers’ violations of posted ticket limits.
Concerts, sports, and family events are all affected by these anti-competitive practices: struggling families can end up paying up to 44% more than the sticker price to take their kids out. A father-and-son baseball game, a mother-daughter concert: these outings provide families with countless opportunities to make memories. Opportunities that will continue to disappear if these practices continue.
The Trump administration has not been alone in decrying these action, in a 2023 hearing regarding Ticketmaster, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) said, “This is how monopolies work,” and “You leverage market power in one market to get market power in another market — and it looks like [Ticketmaster is] doing that in, frankly, multiple markets.’” And Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who has also been a critic of Ticketmaster, has introduced a bill designed to strengthen the BOTS Act.
But that is simply not enough. Many will argue whether Live Nation and Ticketmaster should have been able to merge at all in 2010 (the answer, of course, is no). But they were allowed to nonetheless. And now, 15 years later, a billion-dollar monopoly propped up on hidden fees and scalpers is under the microscope of the FTC.
Forward-thinking Republicans who claim to put free markets and America first must lead this fight. Using the FTC to ensure a free and fair market is not government overreach: it is consumer protection. President Trump understands this issue. It is time for the rest of the Republican Party to understand it, too.
