Live Nation Barely Skipped a Beat in the Past Decade

14 years after the Justice Department greenlit the merger between Ticketmaster Entertainment and Live Nation, letting two major players in the live entertainment industry join forces, the DOJ is trying to turn back the clock. On Thursday, the Justice Department, along with 30 state and district attorneys general, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment and its wholly-owned subsidiary Ticketmaster, seeking to break up the live entertainment monolith.

“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 B. 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.”

Live Nation’s dominant market position is a result of vertical integration and strategic acquisitions, most notably the merger with Ticketmaster in 2010. Over the years, the company also acquired numerous regional promoters, venue operators and artist management firms, enhancing its global footprint and consolidating the company’s control over the entire value chain of live entertainment.

Whatever the company is doing, whether legal or illegal, it appears to be working. Since 2009, the last year before the Ticketmaster merger, Live Nation’s revenue from concerts and ticketing has grown more than fivefold, reaching $21.7 billion in 2023. Interestingly, the devastating effects of Covid-19 pandemic, which brought the live entertainment industry to its knees in 2020 and parts of 2021, were very short-lived for Live Nation, which was big enough to survive and profit from pent-up demand in 2022 and 2023, both record years for the concert industry.

Unsurprisingly, Live Nation Entertainment vehemently denied the allegations brought forward by the DOJ, claiming that the lawsuit follows “intense political pressure” on the DOJ and long-term lobbying from its competitors. In blaming concert promoters and ticketing companies for high prices, the complaint “ignores everything that is actually responsible for higher ticket prices,” the company argues, citing rising production costs, artist popularity and “24/7 online ticket scalping” as the main drivers of ticket price increases. The company goes on to call the allegations of monopolistic behavior “absurd”, claiming that the DOJ’s latest actions against “dominant platform companies” is not “anti-monopoly” but “anti-business”.