Mark Meador, companion at Kressin Meador Powers and president of the Fan Fairness Coalition, is the guest blogger for today’s issue. He has experience with legislators and clients as well as competitive authorities with the federal government (FTC and DOJ). Prior to joining Senator Mike Lee as Deputy Chief Counsel for Antitrust and Competition Policy.
A terrible news pattern is getting worse for Life Nation-Ticketmaster. Fans are expressing disapproval of Life Nation-Ticketmaster following the Department of Justice’s competitive complaint, which was filed recently, as well as a data violation that reportedly has had an impact on half a billion Ticketmaster clients.
The organization is proving the DOJ’s allegations right in the face of serious allegations from the federal government that Life Nation-Ticketmaster has taken advantage of supporters by charging them unfairly high prices and broken systems.
The Life Nation-Ticketmaster CFO and President Joe Berchtold made clear during an income call in early May that the business was facing a difficult potential, but like any wise business, he made an effort to convince investors as the Court prepared to record an antitrust lawsuit against it.
Mr. Berchtold claimed it just would not be “legally lawful” for the Court to keep Life Nation-Ticketmaster responsible by breaking it up.
It appears to me that Mr. Berchtold will soon discover that what is really “legally permissible” has been constantly violating a consent order and engaging in exploitative and exclusionary business practices for almost 15 years. The DOJ makes no exceptions when it asks the court to withdraw Ticketmaster from Live Nation, undoing a acquisition it regrets blatantly allowing in the first place.
As a Democrat former competitive counsel, I strongly believe this course of action was the only course of action for competitive officials. Again in 2010, when the Court initially agreed to the terms of a merger between Life Nation and Ticketmaster, it made the parties warning what’s referred to as a acceptance order. The recently formed Life Nation-Ticketmaster conglomerate’s legal contract laid out how the merged company was function with its newly acquired control of the majority of live event facilities and booking. It established precise guidelines for what would be regarded as an abuse of power and the requirements for how it would have to maintain its diagonally separated ticket and lived event companies.
But in training, instead of holding to the terms of their agreement, Life Nation-Ticketmaster leveraged its acquisition to engage in some of the worst antitrust techniques in any business.
Sit Nation-Ticketmaster breaking its consent order is no new information either. The DOJ took the unusual step of both strengthening and extending the order through 2025 weeks before the consent order was initially set to expire. Following the DOJ’s conclusion, Life Nation-Ticketmaster made the decision to use their combined power to coerce locations into using Ticketmaster as their ticket partner in order to miss out on seeing the best acts in the industry.
The Department’s “most major enforcement actions of an existing competitive order by the Department in 20 years” was not at odds with the consent decree news. Additionally, it stated that Live Nation-Ticketmaster “repeatedly and over the course of several years engaged in conduct that included” using another ticketing company, threatening concert venues, or taking other specified actions against concert venues for ten years.
One would assume that the CEO of Live Nation would have taken those kinds of threats seriously and taken all necessary steps to stop any and all monopolistic and anticompetitive business practices from his business. 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. In light of the letter the Department of Justice sent to the City of Irvine asking for records, it seems likely that the DOJ believes that Ticketmaster may have threatened the city with restricted access to top-tier performances if they chose a different ticketing partner.
Recently, evidence of other instances of Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopolistic abuses was revealed in Brooklyn. After the venue abandoned Ticketmaster as its primary ticket seller, reports released in January of this year revealed that the number of Live Nation promoted shows at the Barclays Center drastically decreased. However, shows that Live Nation promoted suddenly returned once Barclays resumed using Ticketmaster as its main partner.
It’s no wonder venues and artists would be concerned when they received a threat from a business that reportedly controls more than 80 % of the country’s top ticketing market, 78 % of the top-grossing arenas, and 64 % of the top-grossing amphitheaters.
The DOJ had no choice but to do the responsible – and “legally permissible” thing by finally breaking up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly 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 out in the cold.