The US government is trying to break up Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, accusing it of an illegal monopoly in the live entertainment industry.
Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, said that “it is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
The umbrella company Live Nation Entertainment, which sells tickets and promotes performances, was formed in 2010 after a $2.5 billion merger.
It also owns and operates music venues and manages music artists.
Garland said the company’s business practices mean that “fans pay more, artists have fewer options to play concerts, smaller promoters are excluded and venues have fewer real choices for ticket service.”
It has faced a wave of criticism since failed concert ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Arena tour left millions of fans disappointed in 2022.
Ticketmaster canceled public ticket sales after its website became overwhelmed by ‘extremely high demands’.
It blamed large numbers of fans and attacks on bots posing as consumers to obtain tickets for resale to secondary sites.
Critics blamed the company’s “labyrinthine ticketing process” and high prices, which have more than tripled industry-wide over the past two decades.
By 2022, the company controlled 60% of concert promotion and 80 to 100% of the top 100 arenas in the US.
At the time, a group of U.S. lawmakers, including Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, called on Garland to take action if an investigation into the company found “anticompetitive behavior.”
The US Department of Justice has now accused Live Nation of using a monopoly to stifle competition in a lawsuit against the company.
These alleged practices include the use of long-term exclusivity agreements with venues and the purchase of start-ups to stamp out competition.
Ticketmaster has become the default ticketing platform for many artists because the company controls many of the venues where they perform.
About 30 U.S. state and district attorneys general have also filed the lawsuit, the Financial Times reported.
Jonathan Kanter, head of the DoJ’s antitrust unit, said: “America’s live music industry is broken because Live Nation-Ticketmaster has an illegal monopoly.”
When a federal investigation was launched in 2022, Ticketmaster claimed that its large market share was due to “the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system.”
But competitors argue that Ticketmaster’s withholding obligations will lock them out of the market if the venues don’t use Ticketmaster to sell tickets.
The U.S. Department of Justice had allowed the 2010 merger as long as Live Nation agreed not to retaliate against concert venues for using other ticket companies for 10 years.
But it had “repeatedly” violated that agreement, according to a 2019 investigation by that department.
As a result, the ban on retaliation was extended until 2025.
Contact our news team by emailing webnews@metro.co.uk.
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