DOJ blasts Live Nation, Ticketmaster as ‘monopolists’ in antitrust trial opening

MANHATTAN (CN) — The Department of Justice on Tuesday delivered opening arguments in its sprawling antitrust case against concert promoter Live Nation and its ticketing subsidiary Ticketmaster, which the government claims engaged in anticompetitive practices at the expense of fans, artists and venue owners.

The result of those practices, according to the DOJ, is “a broken marketplace” in which concertgoers are charged exorbitant fees for tickets and artists are punished for trying to take their business elsewhere.

“Today, the concert ticket industry is broken,” said David Dahlquist of the DOJ’s antitrust division. “In fact, the concert industry itself is broken. It is controlled by a monopolist. It is controlled by Live Nation and the company it owns, Ticketmaster.”

Dahlquist delivered openings to a batch of 12 New York jurors who, following what is expected to be a five-week trial, will be tasked with determining whether Live Nation pressures artists into using its promotion services.

The government claims Live Nation has monopoly power over amphitheater venues in the United States. And for the artists who seek to perform at one of them, they are forced by the company to use Ticketmaster for ticket sales.

Because of this purportedly anticompetitive arrangement, Dahlquist said that Live Nation’s competitors struggle to gain a foothold in the industry. Meanwhile, Live Nation has more than a 70% market share in large amphitheater promotions, while Ticketmaster’s market share in ticketing is 86%, according to Dahlquist.

“They give you less choice so you have to use their product,” he said of the companies.

The DOJ is expected to call representatives from competing businesses to testify about having to compete with Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

It could also call artists, including Kid Rock — who has been an ardent critic of both companies — and Mumford and Sons’ Ben Lovett, to tell jurors about working with the brands. Live Nation’s CEO Michael Rapino is expected to take the stand, too, potentially as early as this week.

Jurors will start seeing witness testimony on Wednesday morning after they were sent home early on Tuesday due to tech issues.

Dahlquist teased that, for the next several weeks, jurors will learn “more than you’ve ever wanted to learn” about how concerts are planned and executed.

They’ll also learn about how Live Nation and Ticketmaster have “prioritized growth over maintaining their system,” leading to widespread issues that have roiled artists and fans alike, according to Dahlquist. He pointed to one particularly infamous outage in 2022, in which a presale event for a Taylor Swift stadium tour crashed Ticketmaster’s website.

“Their technology is held together by duct tape,” Dahlquist said. “The goal of their customer service department is to solve half of complaints. And they fail at that measure.”

Defense attorney David Marriott, an antitrust lawyer for Latham & Watkins, painted a different picture of Live Nation and Ticketmaster during his opening remarks. He said his clients are not the “big fat lazy monopolists” the government claims them to be, but rather competitive businesses dedicated to bringing memorable experiences to concertgoers.

“Live Nation and Ticketmaster are all about bringing joy to peoples’ lives,” Marriott said, reminiscing about an “awkward date” he once went on to a Lionel Richie concert.

Marriott accused the government of cherry-picking its statistics to make it look like the companies control a larger share of these markets than they actually do. They did this, Marriott claimed, by using its own qualifiers to artificially shrink the total size of the live event market.

“The thing that they’re calling the amphitheater market, it’s not a recognized industry thing,” he said.

When compared to the more than 20,000 live venues in the United States, Live Nation actually controls a very small percentage of those, Marriott argued.

“We do not have monopoly power, and we will show you that through the evidence,” he said.

The DOJ filed the lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster in May 2024, accusing the companies of Sherman Act violations and seeking a remedy of “structural relief” that would separate the entities making up Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s control of the concert industry. Joining the government in the suit are 39 states and the District of Columbia.

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Joe Biden appointee who previously oversaw the sex trafficking case of Sean “Diddy” Combs, is presiding over the antitrust trial.

Follow @Uebey Follow @uebey.bsky.social