The Beginning of The End of Live Nation's Monopoly

The most important antitrust trial in music industry history kicks off today.

Back in 2019, the Justice Department was faced with a dilemma. The most dire predictions of how the DOJ-approved live music mega-merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster would create an abusive, industry-spanning monopoly had come true. In the decade since the Department approved the merger, Live Nation had used its control of major artists and concert tours to force smaller venues into using Ticketmaster — a monopoly play pretty much everyone could see coming when the deal was first announced. The DOJ had clearly screwed up in allowing the merger to happen, and officials had to pick a path: Admit their mistake and break the company up, or throw a few new rules at the company and pretend like that would solve the company’s very structural monopoly problems.

Justice Department officials chose the latter, which predictably solved absolutely nothing. But the DOJ’s choice only delayed the inevitable. Five years later, faced with mounting evidence of the company’s constant wrongdoing, Jonathan Kanter and the Biden-era DOJ did what their predecessors wouldn’t and sued to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster and end the monopolist’s abuses for good.

Two years later, we’re finally headed to trial.

The core allegations are clear. The government claims — backed by an absolute pile of evidence — that Live Nation bullies venues it doesn’t own into using Ticketmaster by threatening to withhold money-making tours from artists and promotions it controls. Keep in mind here that Live Nation is the largest concert promoter and largest artist manager in America, which means they have enormous amounts of power when it comes to negotiations with venues. And second, the government says Live Nation forces the artists it manages to use its promotion service, an allegation so intuitive it feels like common sense. A jury will decide whether those tactics constitute monopoly crimes. If they do, it will ultimately be up to Judge Arun Subramanian of New York federal court to decide how best to stop Live Nation’s monopoly abuse.

The case before the jury is slightly smaller than what the Justice Department sought in its lawsuit. In deciding Live Nation’s request to end the litigation before it went to trial, Subramanian shrunk the government’s case against Live Nation while allowing the core monopoly claims to go to the jury. Live Nation tried to spike the football, so to speak, claiming in a blog post — which Live Nation quickly and hilariously retracted — that because of the ruling, break up is now out of the question, and suggesting the government should settle the case. Obviously a settlement hasn’t happened and at this point doesn’t appear likely. But also, and to be very clear, breakup remains the only actual solution to the Live Nation problem.

It doesn’t take the world’s most ardent antimonopolist to understand the problem with Live Nation’s multi-pronged monopoly. When one company wields monopoly control of artists, concert tours, venues and ticketing, the conflicts of interest and the potential to leverage one monopoly to boost the other are rampant. If you want Noah Kahan or Phish or Weird Al freaking Yankovic to play your venue, you’d better agree to use Ticketmaster to sell the tickets and Live Nation to promote the show, including paying all of the ancillary fees and taxes Live Nation wants to charge. If not, well, Live Nation has plenty of its own venues through which it can funnel its artists and tours. Independent venues get cut out of the monopolized live music ecosystem, at the expense of musicians, fans, and communities that value independence in its music scene. As the Department’s feckless 2019 consent decree showed, there’s no regulating our way out of this monopoly trap. Live Nation must be broken up.

It’ll be a month or so until the jury has a chance to decide Live Nation’s fate. But today is a major step towards undoing one of the country’s most obvious and predatory monopolies. We’ll keep you updated as we can.