Live Nation Gets To Keep Its Monopoly Thanks To Trump’s Department Of Justice

On Monday, while the nation's attention was focused squarely on the war with Iran, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division announced that it had reached a settlement in its lawsuit against one of the most loathed companies in the country: Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The case was a long time in the making, as it was filed in May 2024 after the great Taylor Swift Ticketmaster ticket bungle of 2022, but in the end it wrapped up quickly, with neither ceremony nor consequence. Live Nation agreed to take a number of slaps on the wrist, but was able to keep control of Ticketmaster, and with it a monopoly on the live-events experience in this country. Live Nation and Ticketmaster first announced plans to merge in 2009, a move that would give the resulting company the ability to take total control of the U.S. ticket-selling market and squeeze everyone involved. At the time, Bruce Springsteen was vocally opposed to the deal, warning that it would essentially give the new entity a monopoly on event ticketing in the U.S., but despite the Boss's protests, the DOJ approved the merger in 2010. The intervening 15 years have seen the new company make the experience of going to any show painful and the experience of putting on any show both annoying and less lucrative than it used to be, with Live Nation operating most venues and Ticketmaster controlling access to virtually all of them. While the consent decree that was part of the 2010 deal theoretically kept Live Nation from punishing venues that did not sign deals with Ticketmaster, in practice this is a monopoly. In 2019, the DOJ strengthened and extended the consent decree after finding out about what Live Nation was doing. Not that it made anything better for either consumers or event-throwers. It took the aforementioned Swift fiasco—in which millions of fans tried and failed to purchase tickets to Swift's Eras Tour thanks to Ticketmaster's website crashing, leaving them unable to go to the show or being forced to pay through the nose to scalpers, in theory the very outcome that Ticketmaster's stupid website's bustedness is set up to prevent—to get regulators to actually try and make a real case. The outrage over Ticketmaster's mishandling of the Eras Tour led to fiery Senate hearings, and finally an antitrust case. "It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster," then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said.