With live music venues open and thriving in Portland, Maine, Scott Mohler didn’t expect to have to help with another rescue operation.
Mohler founded his organization, the Maine Music Alliance, in 2020, as live music venues in his hometown struggled to remain afloat amid the industry’s COVID-induced collapse. The Alliance’s work helped Portland’s scores of venues and event spaces remain alive until the pandemic abated and bands once again took to the stage.
With the scene’s vibrancy restored, Mohler largely mothballed the Alliance, until word broke last December that Live Nation, the most powerful and ubiquitous presence in live music, had set its sights on Portland.
Live Nation’s plan to open a 3,300-seat live music venue in the heart of downtown triggered a visceral reaction from local venues, musicians, and fans worried about the company’s long history of shutting out smaller venues from popular artists and tours, and forcing fans to use its Ticketmaster subsidiary.
Mohler and the Maine Music Alliance reactivated, and by the time the project came before the city council in August, more than 2,000 Portland residents, along with two dozen independent venues and arts spaces, had signed a petition to put the project on hold. Around 150 concertgoers, musicians, and venue owners packed city council chambers, and by the end of a marathon eight-hour session, had convinced six of the city’s nine councilmembers to put the development on ice until at least next March.
The resistance to Live Nation’s incursion into Portland is the latest expansion of where, and often how, fights against corporate power are happening. Over the past several years, a rising anger at the corporate dominance of our day-to-day lives has triggered widespread resistance to monopolies, from union organizing in Amazon warehouses to the critical view of corporate consolidation and monopoly within the Biden-era White House.
Amid the national anti-monopoly resurgence, local-level resistance has risen as well. State officials in recent years have moved to block mergers, prosecute monopoly abuses, and draft new, stronger laws to check corporate power. In Queens, New York, activists and local electeds beat back Amazon’s attempt to set up a second headquarters in the borough.
Whatever chaos might exist in Washington, D.C., local opposition to corporate incursions and abuse has been sustained and often successful. With the Trump administration weaponizing antitrust enforcement into a corrupt pay-to-play system, local resistance to corporate domination may well be all that’s left in the near future.
TODAY, CORPORATE INTRUSION OFTEN HAPPENS at the most local levels of American life—data center by data center, warehouse by warehouse, dollar store by dollar store—where residents suffer the harms more acutely. As community resistance to these hyperlocal projects has grown, local leaders are increasingly using what tools they have to stop corporations from expanding into their towns and cities, and to otherwise fight back against corporate rip-offs and land grabs.
Much like the Live Nation opposition in Maine, these struggles take shape as City Hall skirmishes with developers and front groups representing the interests of some large corporation, be it a Big Tech firm, Live Nation, or a Big Ag meatpacking plant. These fights can’t fix a core monopoly problem the way a federal monopoly lawsuit can. But they are deeply important for residents on the ground, who would face the most immediate harms from an unaccountable corporate monopoly barging into their communities.
As activists know, local opposition and organizing can be wildly effective relative to organizing on a nationwide merger; lobbyists don’t matter as much when city leaders have 100 of their neighbors in their faces telling them that a project is bad. As Portland city councilor April Fournier said of the Live Nation decision, the city was pausing the project to “listen to this huge outpouring from our community that says hey, we’re concerned.”
State officials in recent years have moved to block mergers, prosecute monopoly abuses, and draft new, stronger laws to check corporate power.
Data centers have become a key front in the community-by-community resistance to Big Tech. Data centers offer the lure of some glimmering household tech name—you too can have Google in your backyard!—but citizen groups increasingly understand that server farms are expensive, incredibly resource-intensive to operate, and return very little in the way of jobs or investment to communities. Activists by the hundreds have lined the corridors of city halls and county commissions to demand leaders reject new data centers, and they’re winning.
As the Prospect has reported, city leaders in Tucson, Arizona, rejected a major Amazon-backed data center earlier this month after citizen outcry. It was not the first nor the last time local leaders shut down a data center project; the same fights have been fought and won in places like St. Charles, Missouri, and Michigan City, Indiana, in the past few weeks alone.
The data center fights borrow from the playbook communities have been using for years to stop the construction of new dollar stores. Faced with a different kind of predatory company—one that sets up in rural or poor urban communities, where they force out small grocers and make food deserts worse—faith leaders and community activists have convinced officials to keep new dollar stores out of certain neighborhoods as a way to support local grocers and boost access to healthy food.
Meanwhile, in the past several months, communities have been pushing back against the country’s fire truck manufacturing monopoly. Three companies, REV Group, Oshkosh, and Rosenbauer today control nearly all manufacturing of fire trucks and other crucial equipment, and have used that power to jack up prices and keep the supply of new trucks low. While activists and watchdogs have blown the whistle on the private equity rollup of this crucial industry to the feds, it was the modest city of La Crosse, Wisconsin, that took action, suing the companies in a proposed class action case over their shared monopoly.
FEDERAL ACTION AGAINST LIVE NATION/TICKETMASTER appears precarious. The Biden administration sued the company in May 2024, accusing it of using its monopoly control of artists, promotions, tours, and ticketing to squeeze rival venues and ticketing services, all while ripping off fans, artists, venues, and promoters. The lawsuit, filed in New York, remains ongoing for now, and the Trump administration has at least nominally backed competition in the live music industry with an executive order aimed at ticket scalpers and instructing federal antitrust agencies to “ensure that competition laws are appropriately enforced in the concert and entertainment industry.”
But just this month, Roger Alford, a senior Justice Department antitrust official whom the administration fired for insubordination in July, warned that Live Nation lobbyists were pushing the department to soften their view of the company—a tactic that Alford claims led DOJ leadership to settle a facially anti-competitive tech merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper Networks over antitrust officials’ objections.
“Will the same senior DOJ officials ignore the president’s executive order on live entertainment just because Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls of the DOJ in defense of their monopoly abuses?” Alford said recently at a forum put on by the Tech Policy Institute.
In his testimony to Portland city leaders, Kevin Erickson, who runs the advocacy group Future of Music Coalition, said that, despite turmoil inside the DOJ, he was hopeful that the federal push to stop Live Nation’s wrongdoing would continue. “In the meantime, musicians will need folks at all levels of government—municipal, state—to use whatever policy tools are available to them to ensure that monopolies don’t steamroll local economies and local culture,” Erickson said.
And musicians aren’t the only ones organizing. After four years of aggressive enforcement against mergers and monopolies at the national level under the Biden administration, Trump’s federal antitrust enforcers seem to oscillate between the apathy of the George W. Bush era and a loud embrace of Trump’s personal brand of kiss-the-ring politics and dealmaking. While the administration may continue to fight the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly, it is clear that federal interest in stopping bad mergers and monopoly abuses is quickly fading.
But in the places where Big Tech firms and other corporate behemoths try to set up shop in their push to get bigger and more powerful, the locals are fighting back and winning. Hyperlocal, democratic resistance to this creeping corporate control is even more crucial now, with expansion key to so many monopolistic business models and federal enforcers that have been inconsistent at best. Through sustained organizing, local fights against data centers, venues, and other monopoly-controlled properties are emerging as a key front in the broader anti-monopoly movement.