The feds vowed Thursday to break up music industry behemoth Live Nation after concert-goers have been complaining for years about ridiculously high fees and impossible-to-get tickets, most notably with Taylor Swift’s recent Eras tour.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice, along with 30 states, had filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, “relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators.”
“The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services,” Garland said in a statement. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
The suit accuses Live Nation of having created a cyclical business model in which it is able to exert total control over the industry. It takes fees and revenue from concert attendees and sponsorships, and then uses that revenue to pressure artists into exclusive promotion deals, which it then uses to pressure venues into long-term exclusionary contracts. In those contracts, venues are allegedly prevented from switching to better or cheaper ticketing systems, or even barred from using multiple ticketing companies for events. Rivals have been threatened with financial retribution, the suit alleges. All told, it results in higher ticket prices for fans and stifles competition.
Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive VP for corporate and regulatory affairs, called the allegations “absurd.” “It blames concert promoters and ticketing companies—neither of which control ticket prices—for high ticket prices. It ignores everything that is actually responsible for higher ticket prices, from increasing production costs to artist popularity, to 24/7 online ticket scalping that reveals the public’s willingness to pay far more than primary tickets cost,” he said in a statement.
Ticketmaster, which controls more than 70 percent of the market for ticketing and live events, handled the rollout of Swift’s record-breaking Eras tour. But the site crashed on the first day of sales, leaving millions of fans unable to secure tickets until they hit the resale market for sky-high prices.
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