This article appears in the August 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Five years ago, Britney Spears was rehearsing for her tenth concert series in 20 years when she suggested a tweak to one of the choreographer’s proposed dance moves. “It was as if I planted a huge bomb somewhere,” she said later under oath. Her tour managers, choreographers, and dancers disappeared into a room for 45 minutes. “I feel like they’re going to come back and be mean to me or punish me or something,” she remembered telling her assistant at the time.
Days later, Spears’s psychiatrist switched out her medication for a lithium prescription, advising that she wasn’t cooperating and was refusing to take her medication. The “Domination” residency, which had been announced to great fanfare months earlier, was quickly canceled, and Spears was once again involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility by handlers who—according to a paralegal who spoke to the podcast Britney’s Gram—theorized that the media buzz would boost ticket sales when she returned to the stage.
But the pandemic intervened, and Spears, for once freed from a punishing work schedule that entailed seven-day workweeks for all but one or two family vacations per year, began praying and researching her legal options, triggering the unlikely chain of events that ultimately led to the public unraveling of her jaw-dropping conservatorship. According to her public testimony and other reports, for 13 years the pop star had been quite literally trafficked by a shadowy clique of entertainment industry fixers and professional parasites who wiretapped her bedroom, medicated her, outfitted her with an IUD against her will, and monitored every morsel of food (no dessert) and keystroke, using a sophisticated surveillance apparatus one of the operation’s nine-year employees described as typical “counterterrorism.”
A half dozen streaming documentaries and Lord knows how many true-crime podcasts would ultimately chronicle the courtroom drama through which Spears emancipated herself from her indentured servitude. And yet three years after Spears detailed how she was imprisoned in her own home by a battalion of leeches who institutionalized her (at her own expense) in retaliation for attempting to tweak her own choreography, the pop music industry remains more thankless and constricting than ever.
Just as summer was beginning, both Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys were forced to cancel tours in which they had invested considerable sums of their own cash, due to lukewarm demand for tickets that had been priced too aggressively. The prolific hit machine Bebe Rexha unleashed a torrent of social media posts about how “hopeless” she felt working in an industry she claimed had repeatedly conspired to “undermine” her. And Spotify, as if on cue, announced it was tweaking its “mechanical royalties” compensation formula; songwriters could expect to receive $150 million less in 2025 than they had in 2024. The Guardian convinced 12 musical acts, including two with recent album releases that had charted in the top ten, to share their balance sheets from their most recent concert tours. Just one had turned a profit, of only about $7,000 for 29 performances.
Since the decline of recorded music sales in the early 2000s, virtually every working musician relies on a concert promotions cabal.
These problems are more connected than they might seem, because power and resources in the music industry are so unbelievably concentrated. Since the demise of recorded music sales in the early 2000s, pop music in America has increasingly become a single-payer system, in which virtually every working musician relies for the majority of his or her earnings on a concert promotions cabal, anchored by Live Nation/Ticketmaster and its former CEO, the diminutive mogul Irving Azoff. Collectively, they own or control nearly 500 of the nation’s most important concert venues, sell more than 80 percent of the nation’s concert tickets, and perversely also solely or jointly manage the careers, brands, and business affairs of hundreds of artists, from U2 and Dua Lipa to Drake and The Weeknd.
Readers of the Prospect are well aware that the Biden Justice Department brought a case against Live Nation in May, seeking to unwind the 2009 Azoff-brokered deal that merged it with Ticketmaster. The lawsuit has much to say about Azoff, arguing that his new venue management company Oak View Group operates as a “pimp” for Live Nation. But the action was inspired in part by the intergalactic backlash after ticket-buying algorithms infested a supposedly fan-only presale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in November 2022 and drove prices up a thousand percent and more.
As flashpoints in protracted struggles against tyranny go, the Eras-trophe left something to be desired. Media coverage tended to focus on the plight of spoiled 13-year-old daughters of affluent white women—many of whom ultimately solved the problem by purchasing more accessibly priced tickets in Dublin or Vienna and mentally reclassifying the expense as an educational enterprise—which in turn enabled Live Nation and its legions of surrogates to spend the ensuing year and a half proposing legislation to crack down on ticket-hoarding bots. A far more illustrative media event for the purpose of illustrating the dangers of unchecked concert monopolies was probably the 2021 mass casualty event at Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert, which numerous settled lawsuits alleged was the predictable result of combining Scott’s feral live persona with Live Nation’s relentless cost-cutting and outsourcing.
But to truly grasp the terrifying insidiousness of the concert cartel’s control over the music industry and the artists who are its lifeblood—and why even a successful antitrust case may not change much of anything—one must peruse the work of the leading scholar of the #FreeBritney movement, namely a Northern Virginia anti-monopoly activist named Melanie Carlson, whose deeply researched Substack explores the corporate and para-political relationships behind celebrity drama.
A LICENSED CLINICAL SOCIAL WORKER who is currently working on a doctoral dissertation about the institutional failures of domestic violence shelters, Carlson was originally drawn to #FreeBritney out of a combination of pandemic boredom and domestic abuse expertise. But upon diving into the court documents, she quickly realized that there was nothing “domestic” about Britney’s house arrest.
For starters, it was abundantly clear from business records, court filings, and Britney’s public appearances that a Nashville-based bookkeeper-turned-talent management specialist named Louise Taylor—dubbed #Loucifer by the movement—had played the most conspicuous role in orchestrating the conservatorship. But Loucifer herself was just one in a long list of seemingly interchangeable music managers turned mini-moguls (Scooter Braun, Sal Slaiby) who appeared to trade the same blue-chip clients every few years. And in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Taylor named Irving Azoff and current Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino as her biggest mentors.
The month Britney was conserved, Azoff had been attempting to orchestrate a merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s only legitimate competitor, AEG Live, a company he had essentially co-founded in 2000. At that company, Azoff had personally outbid Live Nation, then known as Clear Channel, to promote Spears’s fourth concert tour in 2001, and it seems likely that he played a role in wooing her back to AEG in 2009. The company her manager Larry Rudolph incorporated to operate the tour, ReignDeer Entertainment LLC, listed its office at the exact address of Azoff Music Management, and was later sold to Live Nation—which Azoff left soon afterward to found a new talent agency with his son Jeff, who wooed Spears as a client away from William Morris Endeavor in 2013. But Live Nation would only invest in Britney Spears on one strict condition, according to an anonymous paralegal who contacted the fan podcast Britney’s Gram: The conservatorship—which was supposed to end after the 2009 Circus tour—needed to continue; otherwise Team Britney would have to handle its own insurance. A spokesperson for Live Nation denied the allegation: “Live Nation is a concert promoter—not an insurance company—and Live Nation never made any statements regarding the conservatorship.” The spokesperson also said that Live Nation had no relationship with Taylor.
The conservatorship was further codified by Caesars, the gaming conglomerate that hosted Spears’s “Piece of Me” residency in its Planet Hollywood casino and reportedly included a clause in its contract with the singer allowing it to cancel the residency if the conservatorship ended.
Carlson sees Live Nation, with its hands in ticketing, venues, artist management, and hospitality, as Azoff’s re-enactment of the old MCA, which before a 1962 antitrust settlement operated simultaneously as Hollywood’s largest talent agency—Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, and Grace Kelly were all clients—and its biggest television studio, under a special waiver it received from Ronald Reagan’s Screen Actors Guild. Owning both the talent and the distribution was not always the most profitable strategy, and wherever he went shareholders grumbled that Azoff was overpaying his marquee clients. But it made both companies uniquely ubiquitous in their industries. Today, Live Nation manages the careers of some 2,000 artists through a dizzying collection of subsidiary management firms co-founded by such legendary managers as Guy Oseary, Scooter Braun, Jack Rovner, and the aforementioned Larry Rudolph, who discovered Spears when she was just 13 years old.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Spears had plenty of revenue streams other than concert tours to tap into. (She is, for example, estimated to have sold $1.5 billion in licensed perfume alone during the period of her conservatorship, and she made a reported $15 million a season as a reality show judge.) But by the mid-2000s, the music industry was in a state of existential despair. Recorded music sales had plunged two-thirds from the peak they hit in 1999, the year “Baby One More Time” sold most of the 25 million copies it moved. Britney’s critically lauded Blackout album, which had been released early in 2007 after getting leaked to the blogger Perez Hilton, sold just 2.5 million copies. “After her divorce, all her rehab expenses and her constant nights on the town at pricey L.A. restaurants,” opined one Fox News gossip columnist in April 2007, “Spears had better get back to work. And just an album won’t cut it. She’s got to figure out a way to tour. It’s the only way left to make money in what was once known as the music business.”
In hindsight, the conservatorship appears to have turned Spears, who at that point was far more interested in hanging out with her children than performing night after night, into a touring machine. And it worked: Spears brought in nearly $400 million in ticket revenue between 2009 and 2017, all while the battalion of lawyers, business managers, financial advisers, and medical professionals on her payroll continued to insist she was unable to care for herself.
IT WAS WHILE RECORDING BLACKOUT that Britney Spears began to report she was being stalked by a “crazy lady” who had been FedExing her strange gifts, photos of herself with butterflies and letters in which she advised the superstar, using a creepily maternal tone, that she was “possessed” and needed to exorcise her “demon spirits.” As Spears wrote in an email to her then-lawyer Gary Stiffelman, “We told her a million times to leave me alone and now she is saying she is going to visit my drunk fucking father in Kentwood [Louisiana].”
The crazy lady was Lou Taylor, who specialized in a certain kind of pseudo-faith-based celebrity crisis management. Unbeknownst to Spears, Taylor had been working behind the scenes for at least four years to insinuate herself into the family business: managing little sister Jamie Lynn’s budding career as the star of the popular Nickelodeon show Zoey 101, “praying and fasting” with their estranged father Jamie, hiring a ghostwriter for the memoir Lynne Spears announced she was writing shortly after Jamie Lynn became pregnant at age 16 with the child of a boy she’d met at a church camp, even loaning Jamie Spears $40,000 shortly before his daughter was involuntarily hospitalized. Taylor exchanged emails with Jamie Spears’s lawyers, brainstorming about who would manage the conservatorship, even agreeing to postpone the request until a particular judge who was known to frown upon giving conservators the power to administer psychotropic drugs to their charges went on vacation.
#FreeBritney activists have spent years researching Taylor’s role in the conservatorship, attempting to assess her actions and quantify how much she extracted from the Britney Spears brand, a figure that has ranged from $18 million to $600 million. Taylor, for her part, told The New York Times that she “did nothing wrong” in the Spears case; the Prospect sought comment from her but did not receive a response.
But the most alarming thing about Taylor and the rest of “Team Con,” which is short for conservatorship in the #FreeBritney world, is the way their careers link some of the tawdriest episodes of institutionalized abuse to the uppermost echelons of corporate America. Just two years after Britney was conserved, Lindsay Lohan’s parents told X17 Online that Taylor had approached them to manage a conservatorship for the former child actress. Around the same time, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love revealed in social media posts that Taylor had attempted to impose a “muted strain of a conservatorship” on her as part of an elaborate plot—masterminded, Love claimed, by Azoff and Lester Knispel—to secure control over Cobain’s publishing rights, which she held.
The history of the music industry has been one of artist exploitation, even as the names of the exploiters have changed.
For most of Taylor’s clients, a “spiritual” connection is one of the selling points: She and her pastor husband Rob have controlled many churches, to which most of her clients seem to tithe a large portion of their paychecks. (Jamie Spears contributed hundreds of thousands of the dollars he made as his daughter’s conservator to Rob Taylor’s Cavalry church.) The Kardashians and Biebers were reported to be tithing 10 percent of their income to a megachurch called Churchome on whose board Taylor served; rumors have since swirled that P. Diddy, now hit with nine separate lawsuits for alleged sex trafficking, tithed large portions of his income to churches Taylor controlled. Diddy has denied all of the allegations.
Earlier this year, Taylor’s right-hand woman Robin Greenhill, who for ten years personally intercepted every message Britney sent or received on her phone and gave every man who asked her out on a date a comprehensive debriefing on her sexual and medical history, was also named as the accountant who facilitated wire transfers and cash payments from Diddy’s various music and promotional companies. (Greenhill could not be reached for comment.)
Both Taylor and her mentor Azoff have done business with Diddy for decades: Taylor worked in the early 1990s as a bookkeeper for Uptown Records, where Diddy got his start as a talent manager before launching Bad Boy in 1993, and in which Azoff acquired a stake at MCA when he was the label’s CEO and boss of current Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge, who is also named in one of the many Diddy lawsuits. (Grainge has denied involvement and threatened to sue the plaintiff lawyer who added him to the complaint.)
Another member of the conservatorship team, talent manager Larry Rudolph, who incorporated the company that managed Spears’s concert tours at Azoff’s family office and then sold it to Live Nation the following year, was a longtime friend and business partner of Lou Pearlman, the convicted financial predator who formed NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, siphoned away virtually all the earnings from their first albums, and according to several allegations made sexual advances on members of the bands he managed. Rudolph also worked with Pussycat Dolls founder Robin Antin, whom a former Pussycat Doll alleges used the girl group as a glorified prostitution ring whose members she pimped out to powerful and rich men. (Antin has called these “lies” from someone “clearly looking for her 15 minutes” of fame.)
In 2013, Rudolph, Antin, and Azoff/Live Nation–affiliated producer Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald bankrolled a new project called GRL anchored by an X Factor contestant named Simone Battle who was found dead of an apparent suicide the following year after suffering from depression and “money problems.” That same year, Gottwald’s protégé Kesha alleged Gottwald had raped her before her platinum-selling debut was released; the pair recently settled the matter after a nine-year court fight. “Only God knows what happened that night,” Kesha said in a statement.
At the time, Azoff had interfered to assist Kesha, encouraging her to come forward with the allegations as a means of punishing Gottwald, whom he found personally “disgusting.” But similar allegations have dogged Azoff as well. Kellye Croft, a massage therapist Azoff hired to serve as official tour masseuse for the Eagles’ 2013 concert tour, alleges in a lawsuit filed earlier this year that the gig turned out to be cover for nonconsensual sex work, first with Azoff’s best friend, Cablevision billionaire and Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan, and then with Harvey Weinstein, a close friend of both men who’d joined the band briefly on the tour. Azoff did not respond to a request for comment.
LAST YEAR, BRITNEY SPEARS PUBLISHED a best-selling memoir, The Woman in Me, about her life in the gilded gulag of her conservatorship. The details were somehow even more dystopian and heartbreaking than all the documentaries and magazine narratives had conveyed. Spears vividly described the process of repeatedly making peace with the arrangement so she could spend time with her sons, only to have the tiny pleasures she was still allowed—french fries and desserts, over-the-counter energy supplements, vacations with her children—taken away for tiny perceived infractions. And she wrote with disarming wistfulness about 2007, the year of the head shaving and serial meltdowns before she turned into a “robot doll,” when she was still allowed to sleep in and drink shots with Paris Hilton when she wanted.
She describes rediscovering her love for performing over the course of a three-year “Piece of Me” residency in Las Vegas, only to be driven insane by her handlers’ refusal to let her make even minor tweaks to the performance. She sang the same 22 songs in the same order 248 times. “It was so lazy it was actually odd,” Spears wrote. “I worried what my fans would think of me. But as always the answer was no. Because if I actually took control of my show, it could awaken people to the fact that I might not need my dad as a conservator. I feel like he secretly liked me feeling ‘less than.’ It gave him power.”
Spears’s specific predicament was so exotic that it’s easy to forget her imprisonment was just a more intense version of the control that middlemen like Lou Taylor and Live Nation exert over all of their “product offerings,” no matter how famous and uniquely beloved.
Just two years after Britney’s house arrest, Axl Rose sued Azoff, his then-manager, for allegedly sabotaging the release of his album Chinese Democracy—on which he’d worked for nine years—in an attempt to force him to make amends with his long-estranged bandmate Slash so Live Nation could promote another Guns N’ Roses reunion tour. In a post on a Guns N’ Roses fan site, Rose accused Azoff and Slash of denying him creative input over the band’s performances: “I was specifically told no lyrics, no melodies, no changes to anything and to sing what I was told or fuck off.”
In his lawsuit, Rose highlighted the power Azoff amassed through control of “the trifecta of (1) artist management, (2) concert and touring promotion and (3) ticket sales” to “punish artists and harm their careers if they do not follow his orders.” But Azoff ultimately prevailed, and the ensuing three-year “Not in This Lifetime …” reunion tour grossed nearly $600 million. The lawsuit was settled out of court.
Rose more recently has had nothing but rosy things to say about Slash, Azoff, and Live Nation; he is, after all, one of the lucky ones. In the Spotify era, an album is nothing more than an incredibly costly and labor-intensive marketing campaign for a concert tour that might end up getting canceled anyway. But a select few megastars are lucky enough to have all the demand they need to make a good living until they die from an accidental drug overdose or occupationally exacerbated bout of pneumonia. The smart ones understand that integrity is an albatross, and do as they’re told.
At this point, they all know the sordid backstory of the original Las Vegas residency, wherein Elvis Presley’s personal Loucifer, his longtime manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, leashed the King to the exhausting seven-year, 837-performance contract at the International Hotel that would arguably cause his early death, all to sustain the Colonel’s own vicious gambling addiction. (The International would send a roulette wheel to Colonel Parker’s room so he could gamble away.)
When Britney’s “Piece of Me” residency debuted shortly after her 32nd birthday in 2013, it was immediately hailed as a transformative event in the annals of the “Las Vegas musical landscape,” historically the realm of past-their-prime easy-listening talents. Britney’s engineered Sin City enslavement may seem in the modern day far more cynical than the King’s, because she was a young mom of two little boys. But Elvis had a one-year-old at home when his Vegas residency began, and he was just two years older than Britney at 34. The history of the music industry has been one of artist exploitation, even as the names of the exploiters have changed.
Carlson remains optimistic that the federal antitrust investigation against Live Nation could yet break apart the insidiousness of the music biz: After all, Spears, who by her own admission does not care if she ever goes on another concert tour, would make an ideal witness. I wish I shared her faith in the system. But after vowing to sue Taylor and everyone else who skimmed a fortune from her, Britney has receded from the public discourse a bit, and in late June the top-shelf attorney who emancipated the star from the conservatorship, Matthew Rosengart, withdrew from the case, saying in so many words that his work was done.
The antitrust complaint is compelling, but the primary victims of the abuses it unmasks are stadiums and arenas that get shut out of Live Nation’s vital supply of concert tours and music festivals. Musicians are mentioned more theoretically, as necessary evils Azoff and Rapino repeatedly vow never to offer more than the absolute minimum, but with few details, most likely because, as Bebe Rexha pointed out to an exasperated Twitter fan who wondered why she wouldn’t just spill the tea already: “THEY PUNISH YOU.”