Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.
They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. Why would TicketMaster want to reduce the number of resales when it collects fees on them?
That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.
The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.
Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest.
how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-ticketma...
[2] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/judge-signals-hell-le...
Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.
At the same time I've been bit by a ticket vendor's anti-bot block by simply browsing the site and clicking their own "retry" button.
I'm sure if I'd've written a script, it would not have gotten hit by that garbage.
It always feels like the scene in Lord Of The Rings where they're waiting for the Ents to deliberate on the big war that's going on, and then after an agonizing amount of time they announce that they just said Good Morning and decided their guests weren't Orcs.
Like jeez can justice move any slower?
Because everyone on the seller side - including artists - make money on this.
If parties other than fans / buyers cared, it would be a solved problem.
Quick example: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWlQS-Dhj7/
https://variety.com/2024/music/news/chappell-roan-cancels-sc...
I've seen quite a few cases of this. Not everyone's money-only.
There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
Why are concert tickets special?
Dinner reservations: I’ve literally never had an issue “transferring” a reservation. There’s no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, I’ve never once had anyone question that.
Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons, so transferring them should not be a problem.
But the answer to your question is: partially
The reason you can’t change it overall is simply airline policy for business reasons. But the reason you can’t change even a misspelling within the last couple of days before a flight is in fact security related.
Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.
Pure security theater, and your argument is further invalidated by the fact that it's a made-up reason. No one has claimed this is mandated by TSA or other security authorities.
The thing is, you as an individual can't transfer tickets because of what the other person said.
1) Allow transfers during a very short window (e.g. 24h before the event)
2) Allow full refunds up to x days before the event
3) Release a small batch of tickets 24h before the event, as a way of reducing the chance for scalpers to make money, and giving real fans a last chance without paying exorbitant prices
All three together offer a reasonable tradeoff. The tickets will go (mostly) to real fans, yet still giving you flexibility in case your plans change (work, sick, etc). And if you know well in advance, you can get a full refund, without having to worry with reselling, paying commission, etc.
Also prohibit secondary markets entirely. Similar to airlines, there's no reselling of tickets.
Of course, this is just wishful thinking. Too many intermediaries benefit from screwing showgoers, so this will never be implemented.
Hotel bookings - again, the number of times I’ve booked a bunch of rooms for work under my name and then we just assign them at check-in, and the number of times I’ve travelled for work where the hotel room is reserved in someone else’s name.
So yeah, pretty sure this is commonplace that the person who shows up with the chit and can verify certain info gets the access.
And of course, there nothing at all to stop concert tickets being sold to verified buyers and then transferred to other verified buyers.
But during this court hearing it transpired - from emails sent by Michael Rapino - that Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” scheme is just a scam to make artist feel like ticketing isn’t the murky Wild West that Ticketmaster knows it is. “Verified Fan” meant almost nothing.
Most concert tickets are not standing and you used to get paper tickets you could just hand to someone else, why should you not be allowed to do this just because it moved to digital?
9/11 changed a lot. Just like how before World War I, passports and border controls weren't really a thing.
You sell your own ticket back to the event. Your three friends of course have their names on their tickets, so they can go if they want to.
> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
Do you buy gifts to people whose name you don't even know?
Or you give your friend's names when buying their tickets so they can go even when you can't or you have them buy their own tickets, or you're sick so you get a refund for your four tickets and your friends each buy their own afterwards.
Get a refund if you can't go
> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
This is easy part.
> There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping
There of course are but they pale in comparison to what is currently happening with scalping. And as many have pointed out, there are a lot of other "tickets" we buy that are 100% non-transferable, these are because wrong people are making too much money
Anyway back to the top post - a Dutch auction foods almost all these issues without weird rules.
And maybe we only do dutch auctions for the big acts that have the worst issues with scalping and whatnot.
Square Enix did that for the Final Fantasy conventions in the US as well (where details of the next FFXIV expansion will be announced later this month), but they added an additional requirement. You have to have an active subscription to the game to even have a chance.
It was a stupid flow that sent me from email to computer to phone and had one-time links that didn't transfer between devices.
I have no interest in going through this much effort to go to an event.
The parent's suggestion still creates artificial scarcity, which is the real issue: people buying tickets they have no intention of using.
The problem is that the artists, venues, and ticketing companies benefit from this artificial scarcity. So we'll never see it change.
"all seats, including the best seats go to actual fans" is not something solved by your solution
Another tactic I've seen when there isn't assigned seating - just different tiers of seating - is to hold back some small portion of tickets to release shortly before the event, devaluing the scalpers' listings.
Online streaming tickets can also help, especially if the fans have enough of an anti-scalper stance. They'd choose one of the endless live streaming tickets over buying from scalpers just to go in-person.
I can only assume that the people flippantly proposing that the solution should be to restrict consumer freedoms don't attend these types of events themselves. Why should we immediately jump to limiting freedoms when we can increase the risk of scalping enough to be beyond the tolerance of most scalpers.
Even escrow systems don't necessarily bypass this because ultimately the buyer is likely spending on more than just the concert ticket. They're probably taking time off work, maybe traveling in from another city or country. So even if they might get their ticket money back if the seller backs out, by the time that happens, it's too late to get refunds on everything else.
And combined with the possibility of getting lower prices closer to the event (extra drops from the event, honest resellers who just can't make it, scalpers trying to cut their losses), even buyers wouldn't commit early to scalper prices.
We'll get bought out by TicketMaster within 5 years.
Contract law like anything else?
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
I've seen it happen multiple times people couldn't find someone to take the ticket off of them, even for free.
Sure, for an ultra mainstream act the likes of Rammstein? A FC Bayern soccer game? You'll always find some people outside the venue willing to pay in cash for tickets.
But anything with a small fanbase? Whoops.
But there's definitely a balance to be found between the popularity of an event and how soon you allow trades.
I agree that you should definitely go see local artists at local venues, but you can do that and still really want to take your dad to see Steve Hackett play a live show. It's not up to you to decide what enriches my life.
> Your life won't be any less rich if you go see a local band instead of Taylor Swift.
Do you disagree? If so, why?
One of my favorite bands I've listened to since their first album is First Aid Kit. On their 10th anniversary they had several sold-out concerts at Globen [1] in Stockholm. Should've I just stopped immediately once they crossed the threshold of 100 fans worldwide? But they are a local band, they are Swedish.
In August I'm going to a concert of a Finnish band called Steve'n'Seagulls. They will play in Karlstad, a small Swedish town. They sell their tickets through Ticketmaster. Boycott I say! They are on the same level as Taylor Swift! (137k monthly listeners on Spotify, compared to Swift's 102 million).
Okay. What about bands that have been around since before Live Nation? Should I skip Radiohead, Guns'n'Roses and Sting because there's literally no way for them to tour except to book LiveNation-affiliated venues?
I wonder if their name is a deep cut Nightwish reference, who are also Finnish: https://youtu.be/gg5_mlQOsUQ?t=17s
And I have nothing against Taylor Swift. I actually like some of her music and I'm sure she puts on great live shows.
And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested.
I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.
Because artists don't always want to extract the maximum money possible from their fanbase?
Artists are not always rapacious capitalists. Sure, they want to make money from the show, but a lot of them also genuinely want to reach people who may not be able to drop hundreds of bucks on a ticket. Always selling to the highest bidder is a recipe for larger acts to only be accessible to the wealthy. And as surprising as it may seem, some of them have views on that sort of thing.
I think that's both true and not. The larger truth is that trying to maximize the extraction during a single ticket sale is incredibly short-sighted of an artist. Having fans attend shows is a very effective way to grow your fan base and your brand, and that brings so much more lifetime value for an artist than you'd ever get from a single ticket sale (except for maybe on your retirement tour --and even then).
On the other, well, I just bought tickets to Iron Maiden’s “all the best bits” tour (who have to be getting close to retiring, one member already has) supported by Megadeth who are explicitly on their retirement tour.
And those were not cheap. No sir or ma’am.
There are also artists like the Cure though, and Robert Smith seems to have a genuine interest in keeping prices accessible.
Actually, writing this comment got me thinking that maybe the larger the venue, the more expensive the ticket needs to be out of necessity. More hands in the cookie jar, and all that.
There are laws against transfer bans. Also, people don't like being required to provide identity information just to buy a ticket to a live event, and venues HATE enforcing identity checks.
...and you'd be surprised how often you can get a refund on tickets just by asking your venue for a refund.
> First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
Now you've opened the debate about how to determine which fans are the most passionate and attentive... ;-) Ticketmaster has a service for this that attempts to address this called Verified Fan.
For popular shows, there are more people who want to see the show than there are tickets available, so you need to pick a strategy for deciding who's going to go.. Ticket sellers have to balance lost profits from lower prices, prices being too high and the show not selling out, and fans being furious at the artist for making the tickets unaffordable for most of the true fanbase.
Dynamic pricing (airline style) and auction-based systems basically ensure that only the rich can attend. Scalping is a way to do price discrimination / progressive pricing. If you're a true fan, you know when the ticket sale will happen ahead of time, and you snatch the tickets quickly. If you're not, but are rich enough not to care, you have to buy from a scalper. Like all discounting and price discrimination strategies, it sometimes backfires; if you're a true fan attending your mother's funeral when the sale opens, you'll have to pay the rich person's price.
You can also see scalpers as being awarded by capitalism for taking risks. They make sure the show sells out and the artist is happy, even if fan interest is lower than expected. In such a case, they take on the losses, if all goes well, they take some of the profits from the sales.
Similar problem with "healthcare" insurance companies in the US.
We need a global crackdown on the breadth of markets a company can be involved in - somehow.
Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival?
Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...
But regardless, the formula for decreasing the price could be adjusted. For example, it could be an exponential decay toward the reserve price, with the decay rate set so that most of the decline in price is early.
Or, for shows that are entirely general admission, like festivals, you could use the alternative form of dutch auction: when tickets go on sale, everyone bids what they're willing to pay for some number of tickets. Then the bidding closes (with ample time for planning), and the bids are cleared in descending order of price, and everyone pays the amount of the lowest clearing bid. This method would find a price closer to the true market price of a ticket and discourage speculators.
The incentive would be to jack up the prices themselves and take any profit which would have gone to scammers. Supply and demand.
The customer picks an option (no resale, limited or not resale price, etc...) and Ticketmaster does it, taking a commission in the process. Maybe the commission changes depending on the formula, but really, they don't care about the details, they are getting the money no matter what.
The problem is not the situation about resale and all that, I would say that part is the customer fault, not Ticketmaster, they are the ones who picked a formula. The problem is that by being in a monopoly position, they can charge high fees, making the tickets more expensive. And by more expensive, I mean something like 30% more expensive, not 300% more expensive.
I don't think Ticketmaster offers a dutch auction, but I guess that if you are big enough and if that's what you want and if you can pay, they can deliver.
Its their product. Why would you want to take that choice away from them?
An example, I spent some time working for an organization who felt strongly that retirees living on a fixed income should always be able to afford tickets to their events. They would bring in big name musicians to perform and charge a fair price specifically so those people could afford it. Why would you want to take that choice away from that organization and force them to price out the elder community members they were trying to serve?
Its the organizations event, they should always have the choice to charge whatever they want.
Unless it's something really, really popular, you don't have to be waiting the morning they go on sale. In fact you can usually pick up tickets for events a few weeks after they go on sale, or even longer. If they run out, there's often a small amount of resale tickets available for a bit more cash but not multiples.
Having come from the UK where you'd damn well better be online in the first 30 seconds or you're out of luck, and reseller sites fill up with tickets at high multiples of face value within minutes, it's a breath of fresh air. (I understand the UK is introducing similar resale price-caps soon)
Of course it may partly be that Perth people just don't go out that much. Either way it's really nice.
Ticketmaster AU have their own reselling marketplace, but it's also capped at 10%.
Scalping is a solved problem, if states want it to be
The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem.
> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform.
The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse.
> I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction.
Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business.
There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.
Current primary and secondary ticketing markets are not ideal, but this proposition disenfranchises whole market segments from consuming art as experience based on economic factors. That's bad for art, it's bad for artists, and it's bad for consumers.
Why should it have such incentive? And even more so, why it should be a concern for the court that it should have it?
[0] https://www.citizen.org/news/trumps-corporate-inauguration-d...
[1] https://variety.com/2025/music/news/live-nation-names-richar...
Yes. It's good that the states can serve as a check on the Federal level government. But why can the federal level government give up on cases on a national level? Just because a different party was voted in?
Our system doesn't have to be this way, even with the federal/state split; it doesn't even have to be this way with the designation of the DoJ as being within the Executive Branch. It's taken a lot of erosion of norms and flagrant breaking of laws to get to the point the US is at now.
There are also cases where states take on cases that the national government never pursues in the first case. IIRC, states pursued the tobacco companies when the national government would not (Democrat or Republican).
Of course, it happens in federal courts, so you also need separate and independent branches at the national level. But states that can act independently are important as well.
Courts in Europe are often older than the countries. Indeed, many "countries" of Europe have governments that only existed since the 1920s, or 1940s (depending on which World War wrecked the old system). Nonetheless, court rulings persisted through that period. So there's a string of independence here that's hard to replicate.
Furthermore, prosecutors are part of the court system over there (not part of the executable branch like here in the USA). IIRC: most European countries are Inquisitorial, rather than Adversarial (like USA).
Finally, because European systems have no "two party system", the "rulers" are rarely one party. Its often a coalition of two different parties, maybe even three parties.
----------
The USA's adversarial style of prosecutor vs defendant is extremely unique. Both good and bad. One of the bads is that prosecutors will give up on cases that mismatch with the politicians in charge.
But there's many mechanisms that would have prevented this situation from arising in France or Germany.
This is more why DOJ cases should remain independent from the executive branch. Politically controlled prosecutions means justice is intrinsically unequal. Having states be independent is helpful, but not in this regard.
* https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
> In May 1994, the grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Ticketmaster had cut the group out of venue bookings in a dispute over fees.[50] The investigation was closed without action in 1995, though the Justice Department stated it would continue to monitor the developments in the ticket industry.[51][52]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster#Anti-competition_...
> By 1994, Pearl Jam was "fighting on all fronts" as its manager described the band at the time.[43] Reporter Chuck Philips broke a series of stories showing that Ticketmaster was gouging Pearl Jam's customers.[44] Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. […]
> The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994, in Washington, D.C.[52]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Jam#Vs.,_Vitalogy_and_de...
- https://apnews.com/article/live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrus...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an... or https://archive.is/KA1wV
Background story by Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-tic... (April 13, 2026)
That paid for the equipment, maintenance, the ticket stock, the central computer, but not the leased phone line (the store paid for that).
These days, you're using your computer, your paper (or phone), and afterwards you have nothing collectible. The surcharge can be $40 or more.
Why the huge difference? It can't all be inflation. I think it's primarily because of monopolistic power and collusion with the venue[0]. But also - when bands toured back then it was considered supplemental income to the sale of the album. These days they hardly make anything off album sales/streaming, and more of their income comes from touring (ticket and merchandise sales).
[0] You could buy tickets at the venue and not pay the surcharge. But now Ticketmaster gets their cut even if you do that.
> Ticketmaster sells about 10 times as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG.
Yeah, that's called a monopoly, even if it wasn't Ticketmaster's intention, which of course it was.
I think the decimal point is a few digits too many to the left here... The various "fees" routinely add up to hundreds
Apparently the state AGs dropped one of the charges that would have led to a more reasonable number there to try to make the decision easier for the jury.
I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.
Elections have consequences.
> The companies could also be assessed penalties. In addition, sanctions could result in court orders that they divest themselves of some entities, including venues such as amphitheaters that they own.
Cases aren't always about the actual problem, they're about what you can prove in court.
Mid/high profile venues know they will sell out regardless, they can shop around the venue rights to the highest bidder.
They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.
Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.
I feel like I could ping any random HN user and build something better in a week, which means it has been done many times already... why don't alternatives gain traction?
jwz has been writing about this for years. I don’t remember if he’s playing games with the HN referrer header on dnalounge.com but you probably want to use https://tinyurl.com/yskf7ypz instead of https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html.
running the service is the cost of doing business
This has really helped in Germany.
I ended up going to the physical box office, where they still charged an extra 40% of the ticket cost in service fees.
But it’s easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like they’re locked into a contract, and fame is such a precipice. I suppose that makes it hard for them to work together for their own good.
Ironically sometimes artists complain about Ticketmaster and their stranglehold, but again, it takes some special bravery to actually do something about it.
Absolute horseshit. They were screwing consumers for more than that since the '80s. Over the last 20 years? It's 10 or 20 times that.
WTF.