The exact contours of the lawsuit are not yet known. Critics have argued in the years since, however, that the provisions in the 2010 settlement never actually stimulated competition in the ticketing market and that Live Nation Entertainment should be broken up. The DOJ allowed Ticketmaster and Live Nation, a venue operator and events promoter, to merge and become Live Nation Entertainment as part of a 2010 settlement. What are the antitrust concerns surrounding Live Nation Entertainment?The Department of Justice opened an investigation of Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, shortly after the Eras tour fiasco. Those venues then give Ticketmaster a cut of the service fees. Wall also refutes the idea that service charges, which go to venues and ticketing companies like Ticketmaster, are just a sneaky way for Ticketmaster to raise prices. Wall writes that tickets sold on Ticketmaster are “actually priced by artists and teams,” not Ticketmaster itself. Service fees vary by venue and event, but average about 27 percent of the price of a ticket, according to a 2018 Government Accountability Office report. In a blog post last month, Live Nation Entertainment’s executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, Dan Wall, argued that neither Ticketmaster nor Live Nation is responsible for high ticket prices. In that sense, venues might want to charge higher service fees so that Ticketmaster, the largest ticket seller by far, will get a bigger cut and therefore bid on a contract. In the 2010s, the company tried to pioneer a direct sales model from artists to fans, “only to find artists who worked with it facing threats and retaliation from Ticketmaster/LiveNation,” he said. “Ticketmaster is pointing at the undeniable power of others to obscure its own monopolistic role in facilitating the extraordinary growth in both fees and also, to some extent, ticket prices,” Wu said. Ticketing companies, including Ticketmaster, then structure their bids for the contract — which includes a cut of the service fee — based on that proposed fee. And for venues, there are not many outside options in a market where Ticketmaster controls a large majority of ticket sales. The answers to both remain to be seen. “It’s not really so important how big Ticketmaster’s revenues are in comparison to some other arbitrary number — like how much people spend on concerts in America or how much they spend in some other large markets — but rather, what that revenue would be in an environment with more robust competition. ”“This is just trying to use numbers to distract us from what’s really important,” Scott Morton said.
