Last night, a bunch of my friends saw Big Boi at one of D.C.'s iconic rock clubs, 9:30; I hear it was pretty awesome. The 9:30 Club happens to be partnered with a new(ish) ticket retailer called Ticketfly, which aims to leverage the Internet to improve the ticket-purchasing experience -- it sounds like a business plan from 1998, but perhaps you haven't bought tickets online through Ticketmaster lately. Which gets to the point of this post: Ticketmaster recently merged with Live Nation, a major concert promoter. Consumer advocates and other ticket retailers (like Ticketfly) worry that the agreement gives Ticketmaster a powerful monopoly over ticket sales to events around the country, increasing prices for concert goers and helping drive smaller ticket retailers out of business, which is why 9:30's owner Seth Hurwitz is out criticizing the Obama administration for not living up it its anti-trust promise: "Given the tough talk that came from them, yes, I expected and hoped that finally things would be different. But they're not." The administration replies to this criticism with promises that it has been ramping up its efforts; the Ticketmaster-Live Nation deal included conditions to protect the market from monopoly and forced the company to spin off one of its businesses. Yet despite the leadership of Christine Varney, a tough-minded lawyer who once fought Microsoft's monopoly, the administration has yet to go to court to block a merger. (Administration officials point out that there have been many fewer mergers in recent years because of the recession.) The next big question is whether the Justice Department will allow media giants NBC and Comcast to merge, a deal that has raised eyebrows among those who worry that combining a content creator with a content distributor will create unfair market advantages. While the anti-trust debate is conducted at an abstract level that doesn't always register with voters, those "convenience fees" you pay Ticketmaster and the cost of cable television are affected by the decisions political appointees make about corporate fair play. Time will tell if the administration will limit corporate concentration to protect consumers, but so far they've been all too quiet.
-- Tim Fernholz
