MANHATTAN (CN) – The Justice Department brought a broad antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment in New York federal court on Thursday, accusing them of wielding monopolistic control as "gatekeeper for the delivery of nearly all live music in America today.”
“It is time to break it up,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference Thursday morning announcing the lawsuit. “We are here not because Ticketmaster’s conduct is inconvenient or frustrating, we are here because, as we allege, that conduct is anticompetitive and it’s illegal.”
“It is time for fans and artists to stop paying the price for Live Nation’s monopoly, it is time to restore competition and innovation in the entertainment industry,” Garland continued. “The American people are ready for it.”
His office is joined by a coalition of thirty state and district attorneys general who seek to break up the live concert monopoly they say is squeezing out smaller promoters and musicians still struggling in the long wake of Covid-19’s disruption of the touring industry.
“Live Nation suffocates its competition using a variety of tactics, from acquisitions of smaller regional promoters and venues. to threats and retaliation for agreements with rivals,” Garland said.
The 124-page antitrust complaint accuses the company of Sherman Act violations and seeks a remedy of “structural relief” that would separate the entities making up Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s monopoly across the concert industry in the United States.
Live Nation controls at least 80% of primary ticketing at major concert venues and maintains a 70% market share in large amphitheater promotions. It has become the largest promoter of national amphitheater tours, reaping billions of dollars in additional fees forced onto ticket buyers, the complaint says.
“Live Nation’s amphitheater portfolio includes at least 40 of the top 50, and more than 60 of the top 100 amphitheaters in the United States. No other entity owns more than a handful of amphitheaters in either set,” the Justice Department and the attorneys general write in the complaint.
“Put differently, it is nearly impossible for an artist to create a tour that includes stops at amphitheaters without Live Nation.”
“These artists — many of whom have well-established, dedicated fan bases but have not yet matured their fan base to play larger stadiums — are effectively forced to hire Live Nation as their promoter or risk being locked out of dozens of desirable Live Nation-controlled large amphitheaters in the United States,” the complaint states.
New York Attorney General Letitia James threw support behind the suit on Thursday.
“Everybody agrees, Live Nation and Ticketmaster are the problem, and it’s time for a new era,” James wrote.
“For too long, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have unfairly and illegally run the world of live events, abusing their dominance to overcharge fans, bully venues, and limit artists,” she said in a statement. “When companies like Live Nation control every aspect of an event, it leads to bad blood — concertgoers and sports fans suffer and are forced to pay cruel prices.“
Republican and Democrat senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Ticketmaster last year, probing whether the company’s dominance in the ticketing industry led to the spectacular breakdown of its website months earlier during a sale of Taylor Swift concert tickets.
Ticketmaster's website crashed in mid-November 2022 when it was overwhelmed by 3.5 billion requests from both fans and bots posing as consumers, leaving thousands of "Swifties" who preregistered as verified fans unable to buy tickets after waiting in online queues for many hours.
“The fact of the matter is, Live Nation/Ticketmaster is the 800-pound gorilla here," U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said at the committee hearing. “This whole concert ticket system is a mess, a monopolistic mess.”
U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, joined in the committee’s criticism of Ticketmaster’s exorbitant tickets, recalling packing into a friend’s car in high school in the 1970s to go to concerts by Led Zeppelin, The Cars and Aerosmith.
These days, she said, ticket prices have gotten so high that shows are too expensive for many fans. Klobuchar said ticket fees now average 27% of the ticket cost and can climb as high as 75%.
At the press conference on Thursday morning, Attorney General Garland recalled a personal experience of his own as a college senior in the 1970s seeing a young, then-unknown Bruce Springsteen open for blues guitarist Bonnie Raitt.
“We all knew we had just seen the future of rock and roll,” he said.
Ticketmaster, founded in 1976 as an independent ticketing company, has been on the receiving end of a long line of antitrust lawsuits. Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam began the tradition in 1994, protesting the company’s practice of charging concertgoers add-on fees.
In that case, the court did not deny the band's claim that the ticket giant held a monopoly, but ultimately found that music venues, not bands, would be the proper plaintiffs, because the venues were on the losing end of Ticketmaster's actions.
At the height of its fame in the mid-1990s, Pearl Jam canceled its tour that summer while the case was pending and attempted to book venues that didn't use Ticketmaster to sell tickets.
Frustration over Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift fiasco three decades later prompted the so-called Taylor Swift bill that was signed into Minnesota state law by Governor Tim Walz earlier this month.
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