USA v. Live Nation-Ticketmaster: all the news on the lawsuit that could take down a giant

The US Justice Department and 30 state and district attorneys general have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, alleging that it has a monopoly in the live ticketing industry that enables it to illegally suppress competition.

“It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

The Department of Justice is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit could reportedly come as early as next month and will target the company’s alleged monopoly in the live ticketing industry.

Live Nation drew antitrust scrutiny when it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010. But those concerns boiled over in November 2022 when a Ticketmaster crash blocked thousands of Taylor Swift fans from purchasing tickets for the Eras Tour due to “unprecedented demand.” The DOJ opened an investigation into Live Nation shortly after, The New York Times reported.

Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, promised to scrap the hidden fees plaguing its ticketing service earlier this year. But one senator says the company’s not doing nearly enough. 

In a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino Wednesday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) called on the company to turn on an “all-in” pricing filter that it added this year by default. Klobuchar said it’s “still too difficult” for users to turn on the filter that’s “buried within a tab that gives no indication that it contains” the option in the first place. 

President Joe Biden is set to announce that ticketing giants Live Nation and Ticketmaster have promised to disclose the full price of tickets upfront, essentially removing the haunting prospect of hidden fees at checkout, according to Reuters. 

Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been the focus of regulatory ire for years, but scrutiny hit a fever pitch last November when Live Nation canceled ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. While the Swift cancellations were reportedly due to a bot attack, the event became the focus of critics who argue that Live Nation drives up ticketing costs and fees for customers by entering into anti-competitive contracts with venues. 

This special episode of Decoder dives deep into Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023 because Taylor Swift fans were upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts.

And since it’s a special episode, we’re trying something new. We produced a video you can watch in this post or on YouTube. Let us know what you think.

Ticketmaster is about to face its next big test. Just over three months after the Taylor Swift debacle, Ticketmaster will be the place to buy tickets for Beyoncé’s upcoming Renaissance World Tour that was announced on Wednesday.

Like with the Taylor Swift presale, people who want to get tickets for Beyoncé’s shows in North America will have to register with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform. Ticketmaster notes in a blog post that registering does not guarantee that you’ll get tickets, and the Verified Fans who actually get a code to buy tickets will be determined by a lottery system.

Months after Ticketmaster botched sales for Taylor Swift’s most recent tour, a top executive from its parent company, Live Nation, faced scrutiny over its market dominance on Capitol Hill from senators and Swifties alike.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold throughout the hearing on Tuesday, arguing that the company’s control over the concert and events industry has harmed consumers. In her opening statement, antitrust committee chair Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) called Live Nation’s business model the “definition of monopoly.” 

A group of 26 Taylor Swift fans are suing Ticketmaster following last month’s ticketing fiasco that left frustrated users unable to buy tickets for Swift’s The Eras Tour (via Deadline). In a lawsuit submitted to a California court, the fans accuse Ticketmaster’s parent company, LiveNation, of “anticompetitive conduct” that let scalpers snap up a surplus of tickets, resulting in higher ticket prices for the fans who could actually get their hands on them.

In addition to alleging that Ticketmaster forces fans to “exclusively” use the service to purchase tickets at prices “above what a competitive market price would be,” the suit claims Ticketmaster also profits off the resale of those tickets through its secondary marketplace. As outlined on Ticketmaster’s website, the company adds a service fee to each ticket sold on its fan-to-fan exchange — but doesn’t specify how much — that’s paid by the buyer on top of the ticket price. The lawsuit claims Ticketmaster has “conspired” with stadiums “to force fans to buy more expensive tickets that Ticketmaster gets additional fees from every time the tickets are resold.”

The Department of Justice is investigating Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation Entertainment over antitrust concerns, The New York Times reported Friday. Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 but have come under scrutiny for largely dominating the live event ticket sales market. Ticketmaster has received renewed attention after it dropped the ball with Taylor Swift ticket sales this week.

The DOJ has reached out to venues and “players in the ticket market” in recent months to ask about the company’s practices, according to the NYT, meaning the probe predates this week’s debacle. DOJ spokesperson Arlen Morales declined to comment.

Update, November 19th 8:12AM ET: Ticketmaster has since reinstated the post on its website with some minor changes. You can see our original story and Ticketmaster’s previous post below.

Ticketmaster has taken down its explanation for why buying a ticket to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour was an absolute disaster. The explanation, titled “The Taylor Swift Onsale Explained,” was live in two places on Ticketmaster’s website on Thursday and is now gone from both. But because the internet never forgets, you can still read it thanks to Google’s cache, and in case that fails, we’ve embedded it at the bottom of this article.

Taylor Swift has spoken out about the boondoggle that was the Ticketmaster sale for her The Eras Tour, and it doesn’t seem like she’s saying sorry just for show. In a statement posted to her Instagram story, which you can read in full below, she says that she’s “trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward” but that she’s “not going to make excuses for anyone.”

She doesn’t mince words when talking about her fans’ experiences with Ticketmaster, saying that “it really pisses me off” what people had to go through to get tickets. She also thanks her fans for wanting to come to her shows, saying they “have no idea how much that means.”

Ticketmaster is canceling the upcoming public sale of Taylor Swift tickets after the presale debacle earlier this week. Ticketmaster said it canceled the sale “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand” in a tweet Thursday afternoon.

Tuesday’s presale for Swift’s The Eras Tour was a disaster, with Ticketmaster crashing following “historically unprecedented demand.” Ticketmaster said millions came to the service to try and buy presale tickets.