In April, a federal jury in New York found that Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster have acted as an illegal monopoly. It was a resounding victory for a coalition of more than 30 states that brought the case to its conclusion after the Justice Department, which had led the litigation, reached a settlement with Live Nation and abruptly exited the case mid-trial.
Those states are now pushing for strong penalties, including a breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster and what may be hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
Live Nation, meanwhile, continues to argue that it operates fiercely but legally, and is hoping to overturn the jury’s decision.
Anyone who imagined the conclusion of the case would bring sudden affordability to the music industry will soon be disappointed. The verdict completed only one phase of what may be a yearslong legal process.
And given the range of possible outcomes — whether Live Nation and Ticketmaster are broken up, or how severe any court-imposed restrictions on the company may be — it is still unclear what effects, if any, the verdict could have on consumers’ concerns about ticket prices and ever-growing fees.
“In criminal cases, a jury decision is the seventh inning. In civil litigation, it’s only the second inning,” said Kenneth Dintzer, an antitrust lawyer with the firm Crowell & Moring who spent more than three decades at the Department of Justice.
What the Jury Verdict Means
After a seven-week trial, the jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had maintained monopolies in two settings: the selling of ticketing services to major concert venues, and through “exclusionary conduct” in how the company booked events in amphitheaters it controls.
The jury heard testimony that venues had been forced to sign long-term deals with Ticketmaster or risk losing access to Live Nation’s stable of concert tours.
In one dramatic moment, the jury heard the recording of a 2021 phone call in which Michael Rapino, Live Nation’s longtime chief executive, told the head of the Barclays Center that it was “going to be a tough time to deliver tickets or concerts” after the Brooklyn arena dropped Ticketmaster for another vendor. Mr. Rapino denied that statement was a threat. The former Barclays chief said in court that he believed Live Nation retaliated by diverting shows away from the arena.
Live Nation was also found to have blocked artists from performing in its amphitheaters — a vital summer circuit — unless they used Live Nation as their promoter.
What is Left for the Judge to Decide?
Judge Arun Subramanian of U.S. District Court in Manhattan will determine the remedies to be imposed on Live Nation. They may include monetary damages or “injunctive relief,” such as ordering it to sell off Ticketmaster or to change how it conducts business.
That process may not begin until next year.
But first, the judge has to decide whether to approve the settlement that Live Nation reached with the Justice Department and the six states that joined in that agreement. The settlement was announced only a few days into the trial, and lawyers for 33 states and the District of Columbia, which harshly criticized its terms as inadequate, pressed forward with the case.
District court judges have the power to review settlements in antitrust cases to ensure they were reached in the public interest.
Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project, who is the co-author of a 2024 paper that called Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster “a disaster for the live event industry,” said the jury’s finding of liability calls for a strict remedy.
The Justice Department’s settlement, Mr. Hepner noted, “was entered into before a jury found that Live Nation was a monopolist. Now that a jury has found it is a monopoly, the conditions on the ground have changed.”
In coming weeks, Judge Subramanian also must weigh in on Live Nation’s motions that seek to revisit the jury’s findings. One filing seeks to vacate the jury’s verdict, arguing that the government had, in Live Nation’s view, “gerrymandered” an artificially small selection of about 250 concert venues that did not fairly represent the true market.
“Plaintiffs used the jury trial to smear Defendants with cherrypicked documents, ancillary issues, and emotional charges,” Live Nation’s lawyers wrote. “But they failed to present meaningful evidence on core legal elements of their claims.”
A second filing requesting a new trial takes aim at the states’ damages expert, arguing that her analysis of ticketing fees was fatally flawed because it did not account for the impact of advance payments made to venues as part of ticketing contracts. The states argued that the expert’s methodology was sound.
The States Are Seeking Major Penalties
In an “initial remedies proposal” filed with the court last month, the states laid out a series of requests that, if approved by the judge, could significantly alter Live Nation’s business and reshape the concert industry overall.
According to the proposal, the states intend to ask the judge to order Live Nation to divest Ticketmaster — effectively undoing a merger that the federal government had approved in 2010 — and to limit Live Nation’s ability to re-enter the ticketing market. The states also want Live Nation to sell “a sufficient number” of amphitheaters to terminate its monopoly, and for the judge to prohibit the company from restricting a venue’s access to Live Nation’s tours if the venue does not use Ticketmaster.
Live Nation has been outspoken in suggesting the jury’s verdict does not support a divestiture of Ticketmaster. “The states’ request for a breakup is performative and political,” Dan Wall, Live Nation’s former longtime antitrust lawyer and now a top executive at the company, said in a statement.
The states also seek significant financial penalties. In addition to the monetary damages cited by the jury, the states said they planned to request “disgorgement of ill-gotten profits” along with restitution and what it called civil penalties “to punish the violations found and deter future violations.”
The states did not specify the monetary penalty they are seeking. But if the judge accepts their arguments, that could easily amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Live Nation, in its first-quarter earnings report, released in May, said it had already accrued $450 million in legal costs, which the company said “represents our best estimate of the ultimate loss associated with the settling states and the jury’s damages award.”
What Happens on the Concert Front Now?
For the music world, status quo will reign for the immediate future, as the court presides over what could be a long and contentious process.
In the meantime, Live Nation is putting on tours, Ticketmaster is selling tickets, and artists are hitting the road.
The optics of the trial were not great for the company. At one point jurors saw, and the media reported about, an internal Slack chain in which two Live Nation employees bragged about overcharging concertgoers for parking and other amenities; one employee said they were “robbing them blind baby.”
But ticket sales have not suffered. In announcing its first-quarter earnings, the company said it is off to a strong start for the year, having sold 107 million tickets so far, which it called an 11 percent increase from the same period in 2025.
Mr. Dintzer, the former Justice Department lawyer, estimated that, if the case goes through the expected route of appeals, it could be 2029 before there is a resolution — or even later, if the case goes to the Supreme Court.
Live Nation has indicated that it will fight the case at every turn. The company issued a statement at the conclusion of the trial saying that “the jury’s verdict is not the last word on this matter” and noting that “Live Nation can and will appeal any unfavorable rulings” on its outstanding motions.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
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