The Department of Justice sued Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation in federal court Thursday, alleging they violated antitrust laws and monopolize the live entertainment industry to the detriment of concertgoers, venues, promoters and artists.
Filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit claims music fans in the U.S. are deprived of ticketing innovation and forced to use outdated technology while paying more for tickets than fans in other countries. At the same time, Live Nation and Ticketmaster exercise power over performers, venues and independent promoters in ways that harm competition, according to the DOJ and 30 states that joined the case.
“We allege that Live Nation 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,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “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. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
The lawsuit follows a DOJ investigation into whether Live Nation maintains a monopoly in the ticket industry and violated antitrust laws, a probe launched in 2022 and bolstered by fan complaints after a botched rollout for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, per CNBC.
Live Nation directly manages more than 400 musical artists and controls around 60% of concert promotions at major concert venues across the country, according to the lawsuit. The company also owns or controls more than 265 concert venues in North America, including more than 60 of the top 100 amphitheaters in the U.S. For comparison, its closest rival owns no more than a handful of top amphitheaters. And through Ticketmaster, Live Nation controls roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market, the DOJ says.
In 2023, Live Nation generated $18.8 billion in concert revenue, $2.9 billion for ticketing, and $1.1 billion for sponsorship and advertising, according to the lawsuit.
“Taken individually and considered together, Live Nation’s and Ticketmaster’s conduct allows them to exploit their conflicts of interest — as a promoter, ticketer, venue owner and artist manager — across the live music industry and further entrench their dominant position,” the lawsuit says.
Live Nation, which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, maintains that the lawsuit is misguided.
“The DOJ’s complaint attempts to portray Live Nation and Ticketmaster as the cause of fan frustration with the live entertainment industry. 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,” said Dan Wall, Live Nation executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs.
Live Nation said Thursday it doesn’t benefit from monopoly pricing, saying that Ticketmaster service charges “are no higher than elsewhere, and frequently lower,” CNBC reported. The company noted its overall net profit margin is at the low end of S&P 500 companies.
Live Nation argued the lawsuit won’t reduce ticket prices or service fees. It said artist teams set prices for their tickets and the venues set and keep the majority of ticket fees, per CNBC.
“Some call this ‘anti-monopoly’, but in reality it is just anti-business,” Wall said. “There is no legal basis for objecting to vertical integration on these grounds.”
Last year, Ticketmaster reported, per CNBC, that 14 million people flooded its website in search of Taylor Swift concert tickets, and a record 2.4 million secured tickets. Ticket buyers experienced long waits, a glitchy website, getting seats in their cart only to get kicked out before the purchase finalized and to come back to find the tickets were much more expensive or not there at all.
The incident led to Senate hearings on Ticketmaster’s inability to process ticket orders for Swift’s concert tour and an alleged lack of competition in the ticketing industry.
The lawsuit also alleges that Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s exclusionary practices fortify and protect what it refers to as its “flywheel.” The flywheel is its self-reinforcing business model that captures fees and revenue from concert fans and sponsorship, uses that revenue to lock up artists to exclusive promotion deals, and then uses its powerful cache of live content to sign venues into long-term, exclusive ticketing deals, thereby starting the cycle all over again, according to the lawsuit. The DOJ alleges that the company’s anti-competitive conduct creates barriers for rivals to compete on their merits.
The lawsuit seeks to dismantle what the DOJ and the states say is a monopoly.
“The live music industry in America is broken because Live Nation-Ticketmaster has an illegal monopoly,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the DOJ Antitrust Division. “Our antitrust lawsuit seeks to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s monopoly and restore competition for the benefit of fans and artists.”