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Taylor Swift performs in Paris as part of her Eras Tour, May 9, 2024.
The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Thursday to break up Live Nation’s monopoly over the live entertainment industry, which it has abused through a range of alleged anti-competitive practices. This long-awaited lawsuit seeks to rectify a 2010 mega-merger between concert promoter, venue owner, and artist management company Live Nation and the ticketing service provider Ticketmaster. Barack Obama’s Justice Department, under the direction of Antitrust Division chief Christine Varney, cleared the deal, only imposing a weak consent decree that the combined behemoth has since repeatedly violated, and a divestiture of some of the ticketing business to a third party that gained scant market share.
As a result, Live Nation/Ticketmaster now holds a vise grip over broad swaths of the industry, dictating high ticket prices to consumers, shaking down venues for as much of their revenues as possible, and setting both tour schedules and pay for artists.
Live Nation controls more than 80 percent of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and an increasing share of ticket resales in the secondary market. The company has exclusive arrangements with 265 concert venues, including deals with more than 60 of the top 100 amphitheaters in the United States. It also has a controlling interest in 338 venues worldwide. Over 400 big-name artists are locked into Live Nation’s management services. No other competitor comes close to having that scale across any of these market segments.
As the current head of the Antitrust Division, Jonathan Kanter, put it at a press conference on Thursday, “Collectively, these practices forge an impenetrable corporate barrier around the live music industry. That’s why today we seek to hold them accountable.”
In response to the lawsuit, Live Nation hit back with a blistering statement denying the charges that it holds monopoly power and attacking the DOJ’s perceived agenda. “At bottom, 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.”
Kanter coined the term “Ticketmaster tax” at the announcement, referring to the long list of fees that consumers find at checkout for concert tickets, among them “service or convenience fees,” “payment processing fees,” and “facility fees.”
Higher prices are certainly one prominent expression of Live Nation’s monopoly. But as the complaint lays out, the consumer experience with Ticketmaster as a sole provider for concert tickets is just one forward-facing expression of the company’s monopoly power. The others affect not only consumers but venue operators, promoters, artists, and virtually everyone else associated with the live entertainment business.
On the back end, Live Nation has used its control of ticketing to expand into all other facets of live entertainment, and to bundle services like concert promotion, advertising, artist management, on-site venue merchandise sales, concessions, and even venue parking. Because it has one highly lucrative source of revenue in ticketing, it has been able to cross-subsidize its growth into other lines of business to gain a foothold over competitors.
Live Nation controls more than 80 percent of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and an increasing share of ticket resales in the secondary market.
“Live Nation’s high-margin businesses (including Ticketmaster and Sponsorship & Advertising) help keep the flywheel spinning by financially fueling (what may appear on paper to be) Live Nation’s less profitable promotions business,” the complaint reads. The term “flywheel” was popularized in reference to Amazon’s self-perpetuating business dominance.
Anti-monopoly advocates have been making these overarching claims about the company for a while now, and some documented examples of Live Nation’s anti-competitive conduct have surfaced over the years. But the DOJ lawsuit lays out an astounding amount of new evidence showing how Live Nation maintains its monopoly through a repeated strategy of intimidation tactics, retribution, and all-around thuggish behavior against any player in the market that it deems a competitive threat.
One particular relationship highlighted in the case is Live Nation’s partnership and effective collusion with a would-be rival in the concert promotion space: Oak View Group, run by the infamous band manager and tycoon Irving Azoff. Once deemed by Live Nation internally as one of its “biggest threats,” Oak View Group is now a self-described “pimp” and “hammer” for Live Nation, ensuring the venues where their artists tour are bound by Live Nation ticketing and other services.
“[J]ust like I tell our folks we 100% always protect you and LN on your lanes … I always protect you on rebates, promoter position, ticketing,” Oak View Group CEO Timothy Leiweke told Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino in internal communications obtained by the DOJ in its complaint.
With Azoff’s background as a powerful music manager with industry relationships for big-name acts, Oak View Group could have gone up against Live Nation in concert promotion for its artists’ tours. But Live Nation talked them out of it, seeing as they could both stand to lose from the competition instead of just cutting each other in on the collusive arrangement.
In 2016, for example, Live Nation heard that Oak View was doing concert promotion for an artist it had previously promoted. So Rapino warned Oak View that they’d both be worse off, because they’d have to hand over a greater cut to the artists. “Let’s make sure we don’t let [the artist agency] now start playing us off,” Rapino said. The warning was heeded by Leiweke, who responded subserviently, “Our guys got a bit ahead. All know we don’t promote and we only do tours with Live Nation.” Azoff followed up, calling the situation “growing pains.”
When a similar conflict arose in 2022, Rapino once again reached out to complain. Leiweke responded accordingly, “I never want to be competitors.”
Outside of concert promotion, Oak View Group also completely ceded its arena consulting business to Live Nation, which now includes on its board several Oak View managers to handle that service.
WHEN LIVE NATION COULDN’T MERGE OR COLLUDE with potential competitors, it sought to crush them instead, not by providing a better service but through commercial retaliation. In 2021, Live Nation ran into troubles with TEG, a competing artist management company that opted to use StubHub for its artist ticketing at the Los Angeles Coliseum, which was supposed to have an exclusive deal with Ticketmaster. Live Nation went ballistic and threatened to deny entry at the venue to any fan who got their ticket through StubHub; Live Nation could do that because it controlled management at the venue through its deal. Eventually, StubHub caved and merely tried to work with Ticketmaster to allow fans who’d already bought tickets to enter.
Live Nation wasn’t finished. Among TEG’s partial owners was the private equity firm Silver Lake, which also held Oak View Group in its portfolio. Live Nation deputized Oak View to demand that Silver Lake block TEG from competing or divest their holdings entirely. Once Azoff made the call, Live Nation’s CEO Rapino replied, “Love ya.”
Shortly after, TEG stopped undercutting Ticketmaster, and Silver Lake now appears “intent on dumping TEG,” as alleged in the lawsuit. TEG even asked through an intermediary—Azoff—whether Live Nation would be interested in purchasing it, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit attempts to show that, in order to force venues to adopt their full suite of services and not ink ticketing deals with rivals, Live Nation doesn’t always need to explicitly threaten them. Their reputation precedes them and it’s an implicit assumption.
Rapino has explicitly and publicly detailed his company’s strategy. Regarding venues that don’t want to use Ticketmaster, he said: “If you do that, we won’t put shows in your building … we have to put the show where we make the most economics, and maybe that venue [that wants to use a different ticketing platform] won’t be the best economic place anymore because we don’t hold the revenue.”
In documented examples uncovered by the DOJ, Live Nation has gone to great lengths to ensure there’s no competitive bidding process for ticketing services at venues. In one case from 2021, a venue that previously used Ticketmaster switched to SeatGeek because they appeared to offer a better deal on rebates and recoupment. The venue immediately received hostile emails from Live Nation saying that they “will be very concerned that seatgeek [sic] a secondary provider will be selling our LN artist tickets when not authorized by the artist.”
Live Nation then followed these ominous words with action by cutting the venue off from its artists. The parties later came to a compromise where Live Nation would compete with SeatGeek but heaped on demands to essentially set more favorable conditions for Ticketmaster’s platform. After that nightmarish incident, where the venue didn’t know if it would be able to fill seats, the venue went back to an exclusive deal with Ticketmaster.
Live Nation also has tools at its disposal to ensure that artists under contract can’t use other promoters for their tours. Because Live Nation contracts with 70 percent of large venues, they can withhold those concert spaces for rent to any artists that won’t do concert promotion or ticketing with them. They’re even willing to let the venues remain vacant during peak seasons, sacrificing profits just to defend their monopoly turf.
These are significant and serious charges backed up by documentary evidence. It explains why the DOJ is so adamant that it’s time to break up Live Nation, so it cannot leverage its dominance at the expense of everyone it comes into contact with.
