F-bombs and a vanishing Billie Eilish concert: Ex-arena exec describes 'retaliation' for booting Ticketmaster

• Trial testimony began Wednesday in the DOJ's effort to split Ticketmaster from Live Nation.
• The government's first witness was the ex-CEO of the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, NY.
• He described threats and retaliation by Live Nation when he switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek.

In 2021, the Barclays Center arena — home to the Brooklyn Nets and concerts ranging from Disney on Ice to Bad Bunny — decided to switch from Ticketmaster to another ticketing company, SeatGeek.

The switch didn't go well.

Ticketmaster retaliated hard, a federal jury in Manhattan heard on Wednesday, as testimony began in a high-stakes government effort to split the ticketing giant from parent company Live Nation.

"Ticketmaster pulled up the drawbridge behind them," refusing to help with the transition to SeatGeek, testified John Abbamondi, Barclay's then CEO.

And soon, Live Nation retaliated as well, Abbamondi testified, supporting the federal antitrust allegation that any venue that refused to use Ticketmaster would be threatened or punished.

After booting Ticketmaster in October 2021, the 18,000-seat arena saw a dramatic drop in Live Nation-promoted concerts, Abbamondi told the jury — from more than 20 a year to fewer than eight.

Abbamondi cited a Billie Eilish concert as one example of what he called "smoking gun" evidence: that Barclays was punished for quitting Ticketmaster.

Word got back to Abbamondi, he testified, that Live Nation pulled a planned Barclays concert featuring the Grammy-winning artist. A concert date for Eilish, who was promoted by Live Nation, was switched from Barclays to the USB Arena near JFK Airport in Queens, Abbamondi said.

"It was Live Nation's decision," Abbamondi said an Eilish manager told one of his executives of the Barclays snub.

Live Nation's retaliation campaign did not come without warning, Abbamondi told jurors.

The ex-Barclays CEO said that six months before the switch to SeatGeek, he received a cautionary text from his friend, Patti Kim, a Live Nation vice president.

In the text, Kim warned that he "should think about the bigger relationship with Live Nation" before going with SeatGeek, according to a copy of the exchange shared with jurors.

Kim's email was signed with "a winky face emoji," Abbamondi noted.

"I took this as a friendly warning to me that I was about to make a big mistake," he told jurors.

When Abbamondi called two Live Nation executives weeks later to break the news that Barclays still planned to switch ticketers, the profanities flew, he said.

Joe Berchtold, Live Nation's Chief Financial Officer, "dropped an F-bomb on me," Abbamondi said, when a government lawyer asked how he knew the CFO was angry.

"He told me it was going to be difficult to put concerts in Barclays Center," Abbamondi told jurors.

Asked to elaborate on his retaliation concerns, Abbamondi said "I would describe it as a widely-shared concern in the industry."

The answer was stricken from the record as unsupported hearsay, as was Abbamoni's reference to a Eilish manager saying Live Nation had pulled her concert from Barclays.

Abbamondi's testimony also supported the government's contention that Ticketmaster's technology is "held together by duct tape," as a government attorney had told the ten-woman, two-man jury on Tuesday.

In his opening statements, Assistant US Attorney David Dahlquist pointed to Ticketmaster's Taylor Swift Eras Tour crash in 2022 as evidence that a lack of competition let Live Nation get away with foisting an inferior product on fans, artists, and concert venues.

In his own opening remarks, Live Nation attorney David R. Marriott called Ticketmaster "the highest quality product that there is on this planet in terms of delivering quality ticketing services."

But in his testimony Wednesday, Abbamondi told jurors that the decision to switch was clinched by SeatGeek's superior technology. At one point, Abbamondi likened SeatGeek's tech to "the Mac OS," while Ticketmaster was more like "Windows 95."

Abbamondi joked from the witness stand that the blinking green cursor he would see when running the Ticketmaster venue interface was "like something out of the 1980s."

The Department of Justice has joined with a consortium of attorneys general from 39 states and the District of Columbia in pressing for the Ticketmaster-Live Nation split.

The feds say Live Nation holds a monopoly in the live music industry, which it uses to compete unfairly with its much-smaller competitors— and that Barclays' experience is a case in point.

"They lost concerts, they lost profits, they lost revenue as a result of the move" to SeatGeek, Dahlquist told jurors in opening statements.

"And of course, because the Barclays Center wants to succeed, to be successful, they're forced to go back," to Ticketmaster, he said. "So today, they are a Ticketmaster entity."

Marriott countered in his own opening statement that Barclays' return to Ticketmaster, two years after the switch to SeatGeek, was based not on retaliation, but on Live Nation's superior product.

"They came back to Ticketmaster not because of any threats, but because SeatGeek fell down on the job," Marriott said.

Lawyers for Live Nation say that yes, they compete aggressively — but they do so fairly. Artists remain free to choose promoters, and arenas and venues remain free to choose who does their ticketing, they argued.

The civil antitrust trial, the culmination of a May 2024 federal and state lawsuit, is expected to last six weeks.