What You Won’t See at the Live Nation–Ticketmaster Trial
The long-awaited Live Nation antitrust trial is slated to start today, and it will surprise no one to learn that things aren’t looking good for those hoping to see justice for victims of Astroworld, Taylor-pocalypse, or indie musicians forced to take on thousands of dollars in debt in order to tour.
The Department of Justice is run by a creepy sociopath whose foremost priority seems to be imprisoning people who didn’t vote for Trump; its puppet custodian is a corporate lobbyist whose tenure has triggered the exodus of thousands of lawyers from the agency; and just months after the agency’s generally meek head of antitrust indicted a key potential conspirator in the concert syndicate last summer, Trump pardoned him on the advice of a golf buddy—then fired the antitrust chief eight weeks after that.
But while the Trump administration could surely botch its case against the reviled Live Nation music monopoly all on its own—in fact, the MAGA lobbyists working for the company are counting on it—over the last few weeks, it has gotten some key assists from Judge Arun Subramanian, the Biden appointee presiding over the case. You might remember the name from Diddy’s disturbingly anticlimactic sex-trafficking trial, in which jurors heard troubling tales of a labyrinthine edifice of abuse, but not enough to convince them to charge Diddy with trafficking or conspiracy.
Subramanian’s biggest blow to the case against Live Nation was a 44-page ruling which in theory rejected Live Nation’s request to end the case and avoid a trial entirely, but which consisted mostly of an almost implausibly tedious exegesis on various issues of “market definition” raised by Live Nation’s lawyers and a “hypothetical monopolist test” devised by a government expert named Nicholas Hill. Monopoly denialists (and defense attorneys) love harping on “market definition” because it delights pedants and puts juries (and journalists) to sleep; Subramanian, by contrast, seemed perfectly enthused to ponder the similarities and differences between the markets for concert tickets or venues and that for plumbing services in New York and/or San Francisco, which strikes me as a bad sign.
While the Trump administration could surely botch its case against Live Nation all on its own, it has gotten some key assists from Judge Arun Subramanian, the Biden appointee presiding over the case.
For 30 years, Ticketmaster has argued it is not a monopolist, because if its “market” is defined as the international market for tickets to live events, from Taylor Swift concerts to church basement charity auctions, then its share of the market is just 1 or 2 percent, just as Amazon has repeatedly argued the same of its minuscule 1 or 2 percent share of all global retail sales.
As for Dr. Hill, whose involvement in the case has been the topic of no fewer than 49 docket entries, it’s hard to know the significance of Subramanian’s agreement to throw out much of his analysis, but it doesn’t look great: In a previous gig for the defendants in a DOJ merger challenge, Hill’s credentials and analysis so impressed the judge that he threw out the government expert’s testimony entirely.
When it filed its initial complaint back in May 2024, the DOJ sidestepped the economic analysis pedantry by describing Live Nation as a “flywheel” wherein Ticketmaster, its concert promotions and concert venue management business, its artist management division, and its sponsorship and advertising business all feed “self-reinforcing” momentum into the Live Nation mothership. At the core of the enterprise are the aging artists who tour every other summer and boast loyal, passionate fans with disposable income: Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Rihanna. Those artists overwhelmingly prefer to play outdoor amphitheaters, the category of venue over which Live Nation has the tightest stranglehold, owning or operating 64 percent of the country’s major amphitheaters, all of which exclusively use Ticketmaster. Those concerts, for which it collects revenue months and sometimes more than a year in advance, keep Live Nation flush with the cash flow to lock up really big stars like Bruno Mars and Beyoncé and Lady Gaga for stadium tours—a niche in which Live Nation has one semi-legitimate competitor in the Anschutz Entertainment Group—and mega-festivals like Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits.
But in a powerful testament to how weak even Live Nation’s strongest competition is, the complaint detailed how AEG’s own stadiums had switched to Ticketmaster from its own ticketing system, for fear of losing Live Nation’s massive inventory of concerts. In 2023, Live Nation was reported to have promoted 80 percent of the top 100 grossing concert tours in America, a portfolio of business the company has deployed as a carrot to win ticketing contracts from 93 percent of NFL stadiums and ancillary contracts from hundreds more.
As the DOJ’s original complaint detailed, Live Nation’s monopoly also extends beyond its corporate empire to vassal companies like Oak View Group, a ten-year-old venue management company founded by former Live Nation CEO Irving Azoff and former Toronto Maple Leafs CEO Tim Leiweke that operated as a stealth “pimp” for Live Nation and Ticketmaster while posing as a would-be competitor in exchange for $20 million in kickbacks from the ticketing monopoly. But Oak View was colluding with other companies too. A stadium concessions giant founded by Jerry Jones and George Steinbrenner called Legends Hospitality was pondering a bid on a Live Nation–affiliated stadium in development at UT Austin when Leiweke approached and promised Legends lucrative subcontracts in exchange for backing off the master contract. The DOJ charged Leiweke with criminal conspiracy over that deal in July but allowed Azoff and Oak View, which now manages more than 400 arenas and stadiums worldwide, to get off with a $15 million fine and an agreement to “consider requests to provide witness testimony or documents on a case-by-case basis,” according to Billboard. In October, Trump granted Leiweke a full pardon—and now Azoff, who masterminded Live Nation’s 2010 merger with Ticketmaster and is indisputably the most powerful mogul in American music, is listed as one of Live Nation’s defense witnesses.
Which may be just as well, because Subramanian’s order suggests he is unconvinced that the government can prove Live Nation is an abusive monopoly in any market outside the narrow world of musical acts exclusively interested in playing concerts in amphitheaters. A “cheat sheet” to the government’s case provided by the DOJ leaves out mention of its earlier claim that Live Nation had monopolized the concert promotion industry, which is especially shocking since the corporate precursor of Live Nation’s concert promotion division, a rollup of more than a dozen regional promoters called SFX Entertainment, has been under periodic DOJ antitrust scrutiny dating back more than a decade before the Live Nation merger.
In a separate ruling last week, Subramanian also decided to block both sides from discussion of the various consent decrees with which Live Nation has been ordered to comply as a condition of its merger approval in 2010. Those consent decrees explicitly barred Live Nation from using its concert monopoly to retaliate against venues that attempted to break the yoke of its ticketing monopoly by signing deals with upstart ticketing services like SeatGeek and StubHub. But starting almost immediately after the merger closed, Live Nation repeatedly flouted the terms of the agreement so brazenly, gleefully cutting off shows to venues that tried to use competing ticketing apps and threatening everyone else into submission, that the Trump administration’s unfailingly monopolophile antitrust chief Makan Delrahim—who currently represents Azoff’s scandal-plagued FireAid foundation and is busily shepherding the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros.—was forced to sue Live Nation in 2019 to modify it. When Live Nation agreed to the modified agreement, the DOJ appointed a former assistant attorney general and Kirkland & Ellis partner to monitor the company’s compliance.
That monitor was none other than Mark Filip, the highest-ranking DOJ official to sign off on Jeffrey Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement back in 2008. When the DOJ recommended him for the Live Nation monitorship in 2020, he was working as the lead criminal attorney representing Boeing during the DOJ investigation of the shocking corporate fraud and malfeasance that had led to the 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019. Filip was a rather questionable pick for the DOJ to recommend for the task of monitoring Live Nation compliance, because Boeing had spent the first six months of the probe into the MAX murders refusing to cooperate at all until the agency agreed to transfer the case from the New York fraud division to an inexperienced prosecutor in Fort Worth, Texas. But time would render the personnel choice even more ironic, after the DOJ granted Boeing a non-prosecution agreement every bit as insane and mendacious as Epstein’s on January 6, 2021. That agreement required Boeing merely to cooperate with the feds in any future investigations into its conduct regarding passenger safety: Somehow the aviation giant failed to clear even this very low bar after a door plug flew off one of its 737 MAX planes flying above Portland, and the company quickly overwrote relevant security footage from the plane’s assembly plant.
During those same months, readers will surely be flabbergasted to learn, Live Nation executives under Filip’s ostensible monitoring were systematically auto-deleting text messages the DOJ had ordered them in a Civil Investigative Demand to preserve. Live Nation apparently sought to call Filip as a witness to assure the jury as to the concert colossus’s impeccable conduct; the DOJ, for reasons I’m sure, moved to have him struck from the witness list. Was Judge Subramanian not the tiniest bit curious to get this International Mystery Minister of Corporate Non-Compliance on the stand?
Within hours of the judge narrowing the case on February 18, Live Nation executive and longtime legal adviser Dan Wall published a blog post telling the DOJ: “It’s time to move on.” The company deleted the post a few hours later after the DOJ issued its own statement depicting the move as a desperate Hail Mary gambit to avoid trial. But there was something that rang truer when a Live Nation exec told an analyst on its earnings call the next week that the company “never expected to get much of anything on that [February 18] ruling” and that “we were obviously very pleasantly surprised.”
I would love to be proven wrong about this, but while reviewing the company’s recently filed annual report trumpeting $25.2 billion in 2025 revenue, I noticed that Live Nation had sold $1.3 billion in convertible bonds in October with an interest rate of 2.875 percent, some 70 basis points lower than the current yield on five-year Treasury bonds. Of course, convertible bonds come with a bonus: the right to buy Live Nation stock at a 50 percent premium to current levels. Put simply, the market believes Live Nation is a substantially more solid investment than the U.S. government, which sounds like a sound bet to me.
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