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DOJ Sues Live Nation, Ticketmaster to Break up ‘Monopolistic Control’ of Ticket Prices
By Pete Grieve MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
The DOJ’s lawsuit, which 29 states joined, alleges that Live Nation’s exclusive contracts with venues for ticketing lead to higher prices for consumers.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Live Nation on Thursday over alleged antitrust violations, arguing the Ticketmaster parent company has become a monopoly at the expense of everyday consumers.
The federal lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, doesn’t mince words, starting off by saying, “One monopolist serves as the gatekeeper for the delivery of nearly all live music in America today.”
The government’s move to sue Live Nation is a long time coming for entertainment lovers frustrated with the system. Criticism intensified in 2022 after a botched rollout of tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which is now the highest-grossing concert tour ever.
Fans waited hours in online queues for the chance to get Eras tickets, many of which reportedly went to scalpers who sold them on secondary websites for thousands of dollars. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle threw support behind the fan push for the government to act, stating that the entertainment conglomerate is too big and too powerful.
After investigating the company for more than two years, the Department of Justice is asking the court to force the sale of Ticketmaster and require additional relief to address the alleged harm.
“It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Thursday.
Who’s to blame for expensive concert tickets?
The DOJ’s lawsuit, which 29 states joined, alleges that Live Nation’s exclusive contracts with venues for ticketing lead to higher prices for consumers. The complaint also mentions other alleged anti-competitive practices, like restricting musicians’ access to venues unless they use Live Nation’s promotion services.
“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anti-competitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters and venue operators,” Garland said in the statement.
For its part, Live Nation is pushing back against the allegation that it has violated antitrust laws. Responding to the lawsuit Thursday, the company said it’s not at fault for expensive tickets.
The DOJ complaint “blames concert promoters and ticketing companies — neither of which control ticket prices — for high ticket prices,” Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs, said in a statement. “It 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.”
Live Nation and Ticketmaster used to be competing companies in the entertainment space until they merged in 2010. Live Nation had been primarily a concert promotion company, but the Ticketmaster acquisition gave it more power in ticketing: According to the Justice Department’s complaint, “through Ticketmaster, Live Nation controls roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market.”
Live Nation manages over 400 artists and owns about 265 U.S. venues, according to the complaint. In many cases, the company owns the venue where a concert is held, it books the artist, and it sells all the tickets.
The Department of Justice says this needs to change so other companies can compete. With more competition, the theory goes, comes lower prices.
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Pete Grieve is a New York-based reporter who covers personal finance news. At Money, Pete covers trending stories that affect Americans’ wallets on topics including car buying, insurance, housing, credit cards, retirement and taxes. He studied political science and photography at the University of Chicago, where he was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon. Pete began his career as a professional journalist in 2019. Prior to joining Money, he was a health reporter for Spectrum News in Ohio, where he wrote digital stories and appeared on TV to provide coverage to a statewide audience. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times and CNN Politics. Pete received extensive journalism training through Report for America, a nonprofit organization that places reporters in newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities, and he attended the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in 2021. Pete has discussed his reporting in interviews with outlets including the Columbia Journalism Review and WBEZ (Chicago's NPR station). He’s been a panelist at the Chicago Headline Club’s FOIA Fest and he received the Institute on Political Journalism’s $2,500 Award for Excellence in Collegiate Reporting in 2017. An essay he wrote for Grey City magazine was published in a 2020 book, Remembering J. Z. Smith: A Career and its Consequence.