Today’s guest columnist is Mark Meador, president of the Fan Fairness Coalition and partner at Kressin Meador Powers. He is an antitrust authority with federal government (FTC and DOJ), client and legislator experience. He served previously as Deputy Chief Counsel for Antitrust and Competition Policy to Senator Mike Lee.
A bad news cycle is getting worse for Live Nation-Ticketmaster. Following the recent filing of the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit, Live Nation-Ticketmaster is catching flack from fans over a failed presale for the U.S. Open as well as a data breach that’s reportedly impacting half a billion Ticketmaster customers.
In the face of serious accusations from the federal government that Live Nation-Ticketmaster has taken advantage of fans by subjecting them to broken technology and unfairly high prices, the company is proving the DOJ’s charges right.
During an earnings call in early May, Live Nation-Ticketmaster CFO and President Joe Berchtold clearly knew the company faced a grim future, but like any smart businessman, he tried to reassure investors as the DOJ prepared to file an antitrust lawsuit against it.
Mr. Berchtold claimed it simply would not be “legally permissible” for the DOJ to hold Live Nation-Ticketmaster accountable by breaking it up.
Now, it sure looks like Mr. Berchtold is about to find out that what actually isn’t “legally permissible” is repeatedly violating a consent decree and engaging in monopolistic and anticompetitive business practices for nearly 15 years. This is why the DOJ pulls no punches and explicitly asks the court to divest Ticketmaster from Live Nation, undoing a merger it clearly regrets allowing in the first place.
As a Republican former antitrust attorney at both the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission, I firmly believe this course of action was the only option for antitrust enforcers. Back in 2010, when the DOJ first agreed to the terms of a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster, it made the parties sign what’s referred to as a consent decree. That legally binding agreement between the federal government and the newly formed Live Nation-Ticketmaster conglomerate laid out how the merged firm could operate with its newfound control of the majority of live event venues and ticketing. It set clear guardrails to define what would be considered an abuse of power, and the rules for how it would have to keep its ticketing and live event businesses vertically separated.
But in practice, instead of holding to the terms of their agreement, Live Nation-Ticketmaster leveraged its merger to engage in some of the worst anticompetitive practices in any industry.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster breaking its consent decree is not new news either. Back in 2019, months before the consent decree was first set to expire, the DOJ took the extremely unusual step of both bolstering and extending the decree through 2025. This decision came after the DOJ determined Live Nation-Ticketmaster had used its combined power to bully venues into using Ticketmaster as their ticketing partner or else risk missing out on featuring the top acts in the business.
The DOJ didn’t hold back in the announcement of the consent decree decision, describing it as “the most significant enforcement action of an existing antitrust decree by the Department in 20 years.” It also said that Live Nation-Ticketmaster “repeatedly and over the course of several years engaged in conduct that included “retaliating against concert venues for using another ticketing company, threatening concert venues, or undertaking other specified actions against concert venues for 10 years.”
One would think that Live Nation’s CEO would have taken those kinds of threats seriously and done everything he could to root out any and all anticompetitive and monopolistic business practices from his company. Instead, he laughed all the way to the bank, pocketing $139 million in just 2022 alone — the same year that thousands of fans across America felt the sting of Ticketmaster’s epic collapse of the Taylor Swift Eras tour launch.
Yet even after that, Live Nation-Ticketmaster kept pushing forward with more abusive business practices. For example, late last year, the Irvine, Calif., City Council voted to reject a proposal to have Live Nation build a new amphitheater and instead opted to work with an independent venue. Based on the letter sent by the Department of Justice to the City of Irvine seeking records, it appears likely that the DOJ believes Ticketmaster may have threatened the city with restricted access to top tier performances should they choose a different ticketing partner.
Evidence of other examples of monopolistic abuses by Live Nation-Ticketmaster emerged in Brooklyn recently. Reporting in January this year found that the number of shows Live Nation promoted at the Barclays Center was greatly reduced after the venue abandoned Ticketmaster as its primary ticketer. However, once Barclays resumed using Ticketmaster as its primary partner, shows promoted by Live Nation suddenly came back.
It’s no wonder venues and artists would pay attention when receiving a threat from a company that has been reported to control more than 80% of the primary ticketing market, 78% of the top grossing arenas, and 64% of the top grossing amphitheaters in the country.
In the face of this kind of shameless abuse of power, disregard for a legally binding consent decree, and repeated failures that have left millions of live event fans across America out in the cold, the DOJ was left with no choice but to do the responsible – and “legally permissible” – thing by taking action to finally break up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly.