Live Nation Illegally Monopolized Ticketing Market, Jury Finds (cnn.com) 40
A Manhattan federal jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market. The findings follow an antitrust case brought by states after a separate DOJ settlement. CNN reports: The verdict was reached following a lengthy trial in New York federal court that included testimony from top executives in the music and entertainment industries. Jurors began deliberating on Friday. The Justice Department and 39 state attorneys general, including California and New York, and Washington, DC, sued Live Nation in 2024 alleging its combination with Ticketmaster and control of "virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem" have harmed fans, artists, and venues.
During the second week of trial, in a move that surprised even the judge, the Justice Department reached a secret settlement with Live Nation. A handful of states signed onto the deal, but more than two dozen proceeded to trial. Under the DOJ deal, Live Nation agreed to allow competitors, like SeatGeek or StubHub, to offer tickets to its events, cap ticketing service fees at 15%, and divest exclusive booking agreements with 13 amphitheaters. The deal includes a $280 million settlement fund for state damages claims for the handful of states that signed onto the deal. The DOJ settlement requires the judge's approval.
During the second week of trial, in a move that surprised even the judge, the Justice Department reached a secret settlement with Live Nation. A handful of states signed onto the deal, but more than two dozen proceeded to trial. Under the DOJ deal, Live Nation agreed to allow competitors, like SeatGeek or StubHub, to offer tickets to its events, cap ticketing service fees at 15%, and divest exclusive booking agreements with 13 amphitheaters. The deal includes a $280 million settlement fund for state damages claims for the handful of states that signed onto the deal. The DOJ settlement requires the judge's approval.
wild (Score:2)
40 years without a monopoly breakup (Score:2)
The last major company force to break up due to a monopoly status or massive fraud was AT&T in 1984, over 40 years ago.
We will know that there is a pro-consumer regulatory environment when companies having a de-facto monopoly (ticket sellers), or massive fraud (Wells Fargo identify theft), systemic violation of laws (Sony loading spyware via a music CD), etc. when
- The company is broken up
- The company is prevented from combining with other companies
- The company is shut down
- The company is prevented f
Justice (Score:5, Insightful)
What does this accomplish (Score:5, Insightful)
It certainly looks like the secret agreement by the DOJ sold the entire lawsuit and US down the river. Ticketmaster gets 15% of all ticket sales and 13 amphitheaters in the US can divest themselves of exclusive booking. I assume this doesn't change a bit what their processing fees and handling fees add above the actual ticket price. On top of all of that, this legitimizes all of the worst behaviors this company had as a newly legalized form of customer fisting.
Re: (Score:1)
only for the states stupid enough to go along with the settlement. You can probably guess which ones those were...
Ticket prices will always be market value (Score:2, Interesting)
Live Nation/Ticket Master are a scourge to the artists. The fans will always pay the market price. The artists were the ones getting screwed.
A Dutch auction is probably the fairest way to sell concert tickets. The sale price for the front row of Taylo
That's not actually how anything works (Score:5, Interesting)
For the absolute top of the line acts like Taylor Swift the people get obsessed with going to see yeah you have a point.
If you go even one level below Taylor Swift you have a curious situation.
You can actually go to a concert and it's sold out but half empty. That's because you have a concert with a thousand seats and each ticket is being sold for $100 in order to guarantee a sell out, however scalpers buy all the tickets and sell them for $300 each because there's 500 people that will pay that and 500 people that will just skip going at that price.
This isn't theoretical bands have been complaining about this for years because what happens is they have a sell-out show and then they can't sell any merchandise because hardly anyone showed up to their sold-out show. And since a lot of bands make their living off merch sold at shows that basically wrecks them.
I forget which band but one of them that brought it up had shows where maybe 10% of their fans made it to what was on paper was sold out show. It bankrupted them.
So yeah Taylor Swift doesn't have any problems but plenty of bands do. If you've got a smaller band you like that isn't touring there's a good chance that's why.
Our current pretend free market economy has all sorts of nasty little perverse incentives like that.
stop blaming the free market (Score:2, Insightful)
Scalpers are doing what the market does (Score:5, Interesting)
We recognize that fact decades ago and we created laws to regulate the market. Because we recognized that the market does not regulate itself and cannot function in a free and open system. Like a sports game it needs a referee and that's the government and the bureaucrats.
The problem here is in the market failure it's a government failure. We stopped and forcing antitrust law and this is where it gets us. You have a single ticket seller and a small handful of venue owners and they can work with the scalpers to create the current situation that maximizes their profits at the expense of consumers and musicians.
Remember the new owners and record companies love scalpers because they are guaranteed to sell out all the tickets and they can move any risk onto the scalper. This is only possible because a lack of antitrust law enforcement means record companies and venue owners can have a low quality product and then avoid competition by buying up competitors or using their market dominance to run competitors out of business
Re: (Score:2)
Anti-trust is not a necessary condition for scalpers to control the market. Competition between the scalpers might provide some relief in the last minutes prices, but there is still incentive for average scalped prices to remain above list prices.
The market failure is that the performers suffer a reputational hit that the scalpers don't, since the scalpers are selling to a subset of the fans. The performers are thus incentivized to sell below the market clearing price which provides the surplus for the scal
Re: (Score:2)
This is simply a fact of life.
ticket Lotteries fixes the rush buy issues and mak (Score:2)
ticket Lotteries fixes the rush buy issues and makes it more fair but no we have people doing BS like well if you pay like $1000 then we give you the right to buy an ticket at list price for the next X years and you get to skip the rush to sell out in an few min.
Re: (Score:2)
And this is why I hate people who have blind Faith in the free market.
I have a decent amount of faith in the functionality of a free market. It's just that truly free markets are not that common. How many markets are there where buyers and sellers can easily enter and leave the market and all prices are perfectly known to all buyers and sellers? It's really hard to think of even one market that is truly free.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who woulda have thought?
Re: (Score:2)
And you can never have a free market in this case because they only really work with fungible goods. I can't enter the market with my own Taylor Swift concerts to meet demand, only she can produce them. Every artist is their own natural monopoly.
Re: (Score:2)
So what is it - a "free market", or a "pretend free market"?
Pretty obviously the latter. That is where the remedy is needed.
Re: (Score:2)
This was not a free market, this was literally a monopoly.
A little demand destruction (Score:4, Insightful)
would be healthy here. But alas, people willing to outbid others destroys any form of pricing sanity. This folks is why I haven't been to a concert since the 80's.
The thing is, concerts aren't something you need to prevent dying of starvation or thirst yet their artificially inflated pricing seems to indicate that they are absolutely necessary for survival.
If you want to be entertained by music, either play your own, or go to open mic concerts. At least you get the chance to directly contribute to the artist in an open mic concert and not some nameless corporate bureaucracy.
Re:Ticket prices will always be market value (Score:4, Interesting)
That may be true in theory, but many artists have goals beyond maximizing ticket revenue for a specific concert. Artists (especially less famous ones) may be more interested in building a fan base than squeezing every cent from their limited (to date) fan base. Other more established artists may just not care as much about the money and just want the fans to be able to have a good time. Pearl Jam famously tried to do a Ticketmaster-free tour with cheap seats and ran into all sorts of obstacles.
With the Dutch auction, people would try to avoid ever buying a ticket until the last minute, which would mean the venues and artists could not count on concert revenue.
People will definitely not wait till last minute (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
With the exception of a few performers like Taylor Swift, a whole family is rarely going to see a major concert. The single people or couples who make up most concertgoers don't have quite the same concerns. Additionally, most artists are not megastars like Taylor Swift where some people are willing to pay anything to attend a specific concert. A Dutch auction for a relative unknown could just result in empty seats or cancellations as few tickets are sold until the last minute.
Re: Ticket prices will always be market value (Score:1)
Service Fees (Score:5, Insightful)
Only a 15% service fee? Even that's obscene. So if they sell a $100 ticket, they're going to charge $15 in service fees? For what? Should be a flat fee capped at something reasonable like $5.
Re: (Score:3)
Not to mention all the extra labor and effort it takes to sell a $200 ticket than a $100 ticket. So their 15% addon fees will scale with ticket price instead of with their actual costs, since they have no competition to motivate them to do otherwise.
Re: Service Fees (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder how Trump will overrule this (Score:3, Insightful)
It's more about the crazy convoluted way our current supreme Court reaches its conclusions than anything else.
Fun fact in order to allow moonshining we are about to completely upend almost 100 years of jurisprudence going back to FDR and eliminate the legal basis for banning child labor Nationwide. I know a bunch of right wingers think that's cool because fuck those little kids (and I don't mean the way Trump does I mean in the pejorative sense) but now guess what you suddenly have a huge increase in the number of people in the labor force that you're going to have to compete with for jobs.
And if you are a right winger it's entirely possible a 12-year-old can do your job because statistically speaking that's the level you read at. I tell you to look that up but well, I mean you read at a sixth grade level. That's going to be a tall order for you...
Re: (Score:1)
Hopefully we can correct this with the midterms
Meh (Score:3)
They will just start up another company hidden by a shell company somewhere that pretends to "compete" and slowly drive the others out of business
Re: (Score:2)
So whats the outcome? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)