Discontent with Ticketmaster has grown among fans, rivals, artists and US lawmakers, who have accused it of abusing its dominant market power. Photograph: GettyThe US Department of Justice has accused Ticketmaster parent Live Nation Entertainment of operating a monopoly that “suffocates its competition” in the live entertainment industry, in a landmark antitrust lawsuit that seeks the company’s break-up.
As a result, “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”, said Merrick Garland, US attorney-general, on Thursday. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.” That frustration was exacerbated after a fiasco during the ticket sale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2022, when Ticketmaster’s website was overwhelmed by massive demand.
Jonathan Kanter, head of the DoJ’s antitrust unit, on Thursday described what he called the “dreaded Ticketmaster tax: the seemingly endless set of fees ironically named ‘service fee’ or ‘convenience fee’, when they are anything but”. As a result of the company’s “illegal monopoly”, he said, “the live music industry in America is broken”.
According to the DoJ, Live Nation directly manages more than 400 musical artists, and owns or controls more than 60 of the top 100 amphitheatres in the US. Through Ticketmaster, the group controls about 80 per cent of top concert venues’ primary ticketing, prosecutors said. It is the latest high-profile monopoly case filed by the DoJ’s antitrust unit, which under Kanter has adopted a tougher enforcement stance. He is among a new generation of progressive officials appointed by President Joe Biden, who argue that anticompetitive conduct has snowballed across the US economy due to decades of lax enforcement. His department has brought cases against US corporate titans including Google and Apple.