9 ms·

Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

• smartbit 6mo ago
  Alternative sources - https://apnews.com/article/live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrust-trial-f0ffdd20dd4f64e8b4bb9d97134b826f https://apnews.com/article/live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrus... - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-antitrust-trial-verdict-monopoly.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an... or https://archive.is/KA1wV https://archive.is/KA1wV Background story by Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-ticketmaster https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-tic... (April 13, 2026)
  • xrd 6mo ago
    Matt Stoller is always worth reading.
  • jaredwiener 6mo ago
    And live coverage with the reactions of various AGs: https://www.forth.news/stories/Ca6C8cj6TyNe7TMMKUnFX https://www.forth.news/stories/Ca6C8cj6TyNe7TMMKUnFX
• hackingonempty 6mo ago
  from the NYT: > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket. I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.
  • tomwheeler 6mo ago
    Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
    • xrd 6mo ago
      Back in my day, the federal government would break up monopolies.
      • deeth_starr_v 6mo ago
        Well, it’s also the courts. The government recently tried to break up Google but the judge refused
      • kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
        Used to be they wouldn't allow such mergers to happen in the first place what with the law and all that.
      • dragontamer 6mo ago
        Bidens administration was breaking up Google before Trump came in and stopped the breakup. Elections have consequences.
  • itopaloglu83 6mo ago
    Oh, silly me, that's why a $45 ticket came out to $78 at checkout.
  • advisedwang 6mo ago
    From AP > The companies could also be assessed penalties. In addition, sanctions could result in court orders that they divest themselves of some entities, including venues such as amphitheaters that they own.
  • jfengel 6mo ago
    I cannot imagine how they came up with that number. If it were under $2 per ticket it wouldn't have been worth pursuing. This happened because they were taking tens of dollars for no other reason than that there was no alternative.
• dmitrygr 6mo ago
  > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket. I think the decimal point is a few digits too many to the left here... The various "fees" routinely add up to hundreds
  • bsimpson 6mo ago
    That was the first part that jumped out at me. Apparently the state AGs dropped one of the charges that would have led to a more reasonable number there to try to make the decision easier for the jury.
    • dmitrygr 6mo ago
      Well, the AGs need "wins" for their campaigns for governors (a common path). Who cares about right and wrong? I totally get it.
• codeugo 6mo ago
  There has been a bunch of reporting on this over the past couple years but will this even effect them?
• rossdavidh 6mo ago
  In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
  • saaaaaam 6mo ago
    It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesn’t really make you wonder at all. It’s obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didn’t?
    • jmcgough 6mo ago
      Bribes, campaign donations, presidential ballrooms. The current administration has settled MANY cases that they'd already won, it's very easy to buy favors now.
      • varispeed 6mo ago
        and sign of law enforcement taking tax payer money and not working.
      • Terr_ 6mo ago
        In particular, Live Nation gave $500,000 to Trump's "inauguration fund" [0] and took on a Trump flunkie onto their board of directors. [1] [0] https://www.citizen.org/news/trumps-corporate-inauguration-donor-pool-littered-with-federal-investigations-enforcement-lawsuits/ https://www.citizen.org/news/trumps-corporate-inauguration-d... [1] https://variety.com/2025/music/news/live-nation-names-richard-grenell-trump-kennedy-center-to-board-1236405219/ https://variety.com/2025/music/news/live-nation-names-richar...
    • dylan604 6mo ago
      this really seems like a naive question. what about this administration dropping the case seems out of place from the rest of the corruption occurring within it? do you honestly think this administration dropping a case in favor of a powerful business instead of fighting for the consumer as anything other than corrupt?
• jazzpush2 6mo ago
  Now do service fees and 'convenience' fees. Every ticket I buy for a movie somehow costs $2 extra now. (As with everything else). Robbery.
  • colechristensen 6mo ago
    California, Minnesota, Maryland, and New York have
    • bsimpson 6mo ago
      And then the restaurant lobby got the CA one rescinded for restaurant junk fees, which were probably the biggest culprit most people encounter day-to-day.
  • micromacrofoot 6mo ago
    usually the service fee doesn't even get refunded, which feels additionally foul
    • wccrawford 6mo ago
      I think that's exactly the point. They've charged you $2 to process the request. They did that work. Even if you get the money back for the event, they still did the job, so they won't refund the service fee.
      • micromacrofoot 6mo ago
        Sure, but imagine a brick and mortar doing that? "we paid our cashier so we can't refund you the full cost" running the service is the cost of doing business
  • dylan604 6mo ago
    My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.
• dataviz1000 6mo ago
  The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.
• jp57 6mo ago
  The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better. I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.
  • sgron 6mo ago
    Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230
    • jp57 6mo ago
      Our basic findings suggest that the auctions “worked”: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the ­ fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use, ­ primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction.... They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. Why would TicketMaster want to reduce the number of resales when it collects fees on them?
      • cbsmith 6mo ago
        > They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.
• kumarski 6mo ago
  Venue contracts are a sort of political firewall against any relevant ticketing technology becoming massive globally. Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.
  • saaaaaam 6mo ago
    Lots of festivals are owned or controlled by Live Nation.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
  Concert seats should be handled the same as airline seats. I can buy the same airline seat from dozens of different places online. Why is that?
  • cdrnsf 6mo ago
    Because the US espouses the virtues of the free market while embracing monopolies. If they cared about dealing with the latter they would empower more regulators like Lina Khan.
  • ricardobeat 6mo ago
    Airlines need distribution. Concert venues don’t. Mid/high profile venues know they will sell out regardless, they can shop around the venue rights to the highest bidder.
  • cbsmith 6mo ago
    Ask yourself why airlines deliberately overbook flights while venues do their best to never overbook events, why are subject to identify verification before a flight, and why you go through the TSA before you board... and you'll start to understand why airline seats are maybe not such the perfect metaphor for concert seats.
• cdrnsf 6mo ago
  Do not pass go, do not collect $200. They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.
• HardwareLust 6mo ago
  Cool, can't wait for the slap on the wrist and a $4 coupon we'll get in 2031.
• efitz 6mo ago
  https://archive.ph/dfZVv https://archive.ph/dfZVv
• josefritzishere 6mo ago
  This is very fork-found-in-kitchen.
• sonofhans 6mo ago
  I feel like we had a golden opportunity, years ago, to do something about Ticketmaster. In 1994 Pearl Jam, one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, boycotted and sued Ticketmaster. I wished at the time more bands had stood up and said, “Enough.” It would have worked. But it’s easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like they’re locked into a contract, and fame is such a precipice. I suppose that makes it hard for them to work together for their own good. Ironically sometimes artists complain about Ticketmaster and their stranglehold, but again, it takes some special bravery to actually do something about it.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 6mo ago
  Great, so now they will have to repay the illegal profits and get some measures forced onto them to bring the inflated ticket prices back down, right? Right? Guys?
• onpointed 6mo ago
  A monopoly with competition: "Shares of rival ticket brokers jumped on the news, with StubHub Holding Inc. climbing as much as 5% and Vivid Seats Inc. rising as much as 9.1%."
  • fer 6mo ago
    Live Nation has 10x the revenue of those two, combined.
• VerifiedReports 6mo ago
  "The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket." Absolute horseshit. They were screwing consumers for more than that since the '80s. Over the last 20 years? It's 10 or 20 times that. WTF.
• throw0101d 6mo ago
  I remember Pearl Jam challenging them in the 1990s: * https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki... > In May 1994, the grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Ticketmaster had cut the group out of venue bookings in a dispute over fees.[50] The investigation was closed without action in 1995, though the Justice Department stated it would continue to monitor the developments in the ticket industry.[51][52] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster#Anti-competition_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster#Anti-competition_... > By 1994, Pearl Jam was "fighting on all fronts" as its manager described the band at the time.[43] Reporter Chuck Philips broke a series of stories showing that Ticketmaster was gouging Pearl Jam's customers.[44] Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. […] > The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994, in Washington, D.C.[52] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Jam#Vs.,_Vitalogy_and_dealing_with_success_(1993–1995) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Jam#Vs.,_Vitalogy_and_de...
• andirk 6mo ago
  Someone tell Pearl Jam's Eddy Vedder his work to fight Ticketmaster some 30 years ago finally came to a head today. > Ticketmaster sells about 10 times as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG. Yeah, that's called a monopoly, even if it wasn't Ticketmaster's intention, which of course it was.
• ceroxylon 6mo ago
  What is the moat of the major ticketing companies? Is it deals with venues? It is hard to rationalize how one company can even get a stranglehold on an entire market like this. I feel like I could ping any random HN user and build something better in a week, which means it has been done many times already... why don't alternatives gain traction?
  • mepiethree 6mo ago
    Yes exclusivity with venues. Live Nation owns and operates or invests in many many many large venues
  • dbbk 6mo ago
    Multi-year exclusive contracts paid for with cash advances.
  • acdha 6mo ago
    Reagan halted antitrust enforcement and nobody fixed it, so they were allowed to own controlling stakes in several industries and freeze out competitors. They get exclusives with bands, agencies, venues, and promotions so at each point anyone who tries to do something else runs into a package they can’t compete with: a band which doesn’t play ball won’t get the big venues, a venue which acts independently won’t get the big acts, etc. It’s clearly abusive but they managed to spread enough money around to avoid action before Biden, and then Trump overturned that because he has the same mentality. jwz has been writing about this for years. I don’t remember if he’s playing games with the HN referrer header on dnalounge.com but you probably want to use https://tinyurl.com/yskf7ypz https://tinyurl.com/yskf7ypz instead of https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html.
• connor11528 6mo ago
  break. them. up.
• latentframe 6mo ago
  Intersting cases like this one are a good reminder that the market structure takes source directly into the pricing because when the distribution and access are concentrated then the pricing power often shows up as fees rather than headline prices ; this makes inflation harder to measure but still very real so antitrust in that sense isn’t just about competition and it’s one of the few levers that can affect price dynamics at macroeconomic level
• chiph 6mo ago
  In college I worked at a record store that had a Ticketmaster machine. At the time, it was a custom ticket printer with CRT terminal and modem that took up a lot of counter space. When you camped out and bought a ticket the moment they went on sale you got an actual ticket, with perforations. Lots of people saved their stubs as collector's items. The surcharge was: $2.50 That paid for the equipment, maintenance, the ticket stock, the central computer, but not the leased phone line (the store paid for that). These days, you're using your computer, your paper (or phone), and afterwards you have nothing collectible. The surcharge can be $40 or more. Why the huge difference? It can't all be inflation. I think it's primarily because of monopolistic power and collusion with the venue[0]. But also - when bands toured back then it was considered supplemental income to the sale of the album. These days they hardly make anything off album sales/streaming, and more of their income comes from touring (ticket and merchandise sales). [0] You could buy tickets at the venue and not pay the surcharge. But now Ticketmaster gets their cut even if you do that.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 6mo ago
  Its interesting that the title has to specify that they 'illegally monopolized' rather than just saying they 'monopolized'. The implication being that there are legal ways to monopolize things. Which there shouldn't be. This is a major problem in our society/economy.
• giannicmptr1000 6mo ago
  Michael and especially Jim are good dudes, who still like guitars in a time they often gather dust. From my opinion as a former working musician who never bought a live nation ticket and knew them way before they hit big time, this was not at all their main objective. They just wanted to put on great shows. Ticketmaster was playing the drums and that was a band worth joining. It will be nice to see Live Nation evolve. I have faith in them and monopolies should be broken.