The US Department of Justice is suing to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster, and it could transform live music

Concerns over Ticketmaster’s conduct were kicked into overdrive when it joined forces with Live Nation over a decade ago. After years of industry dominance and fans paying the price, the US government has finally stepped in

After a botched ticket release for his 2009 Working on a Dream tour, Bruce Springsteen penned a lengthy statement which went beyond the average Notes app apology. “The one thing that would make the current ticket situation even worse for the fan than it is now,” he wrote, with a remarkable degree of prescience, “would be Ticketmaster and Live Nation coming up with a single system, thereby returning us to a near-monopoly situation in music ticketing.” 

Less than a year later, despite opposition from fans, artists and regulators, that single system was cemented. Though Live Nation and Ticketmaster were once rivals, the two joined forces to dominate the live sector as Live Nation Entertainment.

Today, Ticketmaster is the sole ticketing provider for 82 percent of the top-grossing amphitheatres and 78 percent of the top-grossing arenas in the US. The majority of those venues are operated by Live Nation. In 2013, the New York Times uncovered evidence that Live Nation promoters had pulled shows from venues that had switched from using Ticketmaster to one of its competitors, AEG. When a booking agent at Atlanta’s Gwinnett Centre asked for clarity on what might have caused Live Nation to pull shows from the venue, the promoter responded: “Issue? Three letters. Can you guess what they are?”

The three letters that Live Nation Entertainment might be most concerned about right now, however, are DOJ.

In May this year, the US Department of Justice announced it was suing Live Nation Entertainment for “monopolisation and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry”. Conduct, for example, like blocking artists from performing at certain venues unless they agree to use Live Nation’s promotion services, or pulling Live Nation support from venues that choose not to use Ticketmaster for their ticketing.

This battle has been brewing for some time. Probes into Ticketmaster’s dominance date back to the early 1990s, when Justice Department officials coaxed Pearl Jam into launching an antitrust complaint against the ticketer. More recently, Ticketmaster drew the ire of millions of Swifties after the ticketing site buckled under the huge demand for Eras Tour tickets in late 2022. This resulted in fans suing Ticketmaster and US Congressman Bill Pascrell introducing the BOSS and SWIFT Act (named for Springsteen and Swift) in an attempt to rein in the “Wild West” of the ticket market.

Echoes of Pearl Jam’s fight over service fees could be heard in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address, in which he railed against “junk fees”. These were described by the White House as “hidden, surprise fees that companies sneak onto customer bills” – but are better known to music fans as the ‘admin fee’, ‘booking fee’, ‘venue fee’, ‘processing fee’ or ‘facility fee’ that can swell your £20 gig ticket to nearer the £30 or £40 mark once you reach the checkout. 

While Biden’s broadside sounded good and punchy at the time, his threats against junk fees came to very little. Within a few months of the address, Ticketmaster agreed to be upfront about the fees they charge – by showing ticket prices with fees included – but without going as far as to explain, scrap or lower any of the fees in question. This slim compromise did not satisfy the DOJ.

Live Nation Entertainment’s monopoly has allowed it to push ticketing ‘innovations’ – VIP seating, ‘dynamic pricing’ that can bump single ticket prices into the hundreds of dollars based on real-time demand – along with the narrative of “true market value” (ie. the maximum the most devoted fan will pay) in arguments over ticket costs. 

In reality, this means squeezing music fans dry. By tying up promotions, venue operations and ticketing, Live Nation Entertainment has little to counter its pursuit of runaway profit. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, the average cost of a ticket for cinema, theatre or concert goers in June 2024 was $225 – a 70 percent increase from 20 years ago. Live Nation Entertainment recorded revenues of $22.7 billion and gross profits of $5.457 billion in 2023 alone.

Perhaps sensing a shift in public opinion, Ticketmaster has gone on the offensive, claiming that its fees are in fact reasonable and that “the venue gets most of the service fee” – conveniently ignoring the fact that Ticketmaster’s parent company owns and operates a large number of these venues. Fees, the company claims, are not the problem. Correct, says the DOJ: the company is the problem.

Among the allegations in the suit brought by the DOJ are that Live Nation Entertainment has intimidated new entrants to the market. “The live music industry in America is broken,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter in a press release announcing the move, “because Live Nation-Ticketmaster has an illegal monopoly.”

A firm date for any trial is yet to be set, but, due to the complex nature of the case, hearings are unlikely to begin until 2026 at the earliest. Possible outcomes vary widely. If Live Nation Entertainment wins out, then it will seemingly continue unchecked. A DOJ victory will result in some form of enforced breakup. 

Piecing up the company would, in theory, create more space for competitors in the market – and more opportunity for new or smaller players. Ticket prices may or may not come down. Live Nation Entertainment, naturally, says that nosebleed-inducing ticket prices are a natural result of the markets and nothing to do with the company or its vice-like grip on the live sector.

In the meantime, the ripples of the DOJ’s announcement will be felt in other countries – including the UK, where Live Nation and Ticketmaster have an outsized footprint.

But this is about much more than just ticket prices. It’s about the future of music.

At the turn of the millennium, record labels were still busy counting their money from booming CD sales and fighting (or blanking) a digital future of downloads and streaming. Then, almost overnight, the world moved on without them. When record sales bottomed out, labels sought to replace the lost revenue through the live sector. They cooked up so-called ‘360 deals’, to tap into their artists’ concert income – but failed to funnel that cash back into developing new talent.

Those chickens have now come home to roost – and there’s plenty of space for them in the massively undersold arena coops that the likes of The Black Keys, Charli XCX, Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez have tried, and failed, to fill. 

The knock-on effects are stark. In 2019, the average age of the world’s top-selling touring artists was 53 years old, up from 35 in 2013. Headliners are heading towards pension age, while the grassroots venues that once honed those talents have been left to thrash about in a sea of financial difficulty. Developing new acts to pack out future arenas, argues Mark Davyd of the campaign group Music Venue Trust, has been ignored in favour of short-term profits.

“In pursuit of increased profits and share prices, too many of the world’s largest music companies are abandoning any responsibility towards talent development,” says Davyd. He’s a promoter with decades of experience, as well as being MVT’s founder and CEO. He argues that “failure to invest in the future of music, which results from that potential monopoly situation, is a more serious threat to the ecosystem.”

In the UK, 125 spaces stopped putting on live gigs in 2023, with more than half shutting up shop for good. When these venues close, we lose a platform for future acts to cut their teeth, make mistakes, try fresh things and gain new fans. And although ticket costs continue to rise, many acts in the UK aren’t seeing much change in their live earnings. As few as 26 percent of 1,700 artists surveyed by the Pirate recording studios group reported turning a profit from performances; just 17 percent of artists have seen a bump in their own live fees. Gigging is becoming, for many, an expensive hobby rather than a way to make a living. This is the ecosystem breakdown that Davyd is talking about. 

Davyd thinks an enforced breakup of Live Nation Entertainment in the UK is unlikely. Instead, the MVT has piled its efforts into community-led efforts to prop up grassroots venues and, more recently, has begun campaigning for levies – similar to those in place in France and Canada – to ensure that money from the big billing shows makes its way to the smaller spaces where careers begin. The campaign was backed by MPs in May, shortly before Rishi Sunak’s sodden general election call. 

Only days before the DOJ announced its Live Nation Entertainment suit, the MVT launched The Artist Pledge, which calls on arena acts to funnel a portion of their ticket sales to support grassroots venues. A second prong of the campaign aims to pressure these enormo-venues into feeding some of their own money back into the grassroots sector. 

For Davyd, issues like junk fees and dynamic pricing are almost distractions from the greater threat at hand. The behemoths raking in billions a year perhaps believe they can afford to continue with business as usual. Cancelled tours, disgruntled fans and a buckling grassroots sector might just be the chorus of canaries that warns them of the very real dangers ahead.