“This has given Live Nation and Ticketmaster the opportunity to freeze innovation and bend the industry to their own benefit. While this may be a boon to Live Nation’s bottom line, there is a real cost to Americans. As described in detail below, today Live Nation possesses and routinely exercises control over which artists perform on what dates at which venues,” the DOJ said.
“Through Ticketmaster, Live Nation also possesses and exercises control over how fans are able to purchase tickets to see their favorite artists in concert and what fees those fans will pay to do so,” the DOJ said in the complaint, which explicitly calls for Ticketmaster to be sold off.
DOJ leadership said Thursday that the complaint goes well beyond the 2010 deal clearing the Ticketmaster purchase. While that case was limited to concerns with a single merger under Section 7 of the Clayton Act, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ’s top antitrust official, told reporters that the new complaint targets “a systemic and systematic pattern of anticompetitive conduct that addresses nearly every aspect of the live music supply chain,” and it does so under the Sherman Act.
