The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. 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 more times a ticket is resold, the better.
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.
Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
Itâs kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops thatâs not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
Thereâs a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time.
Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.
Dinner reservations: Iâve literally never had an issue âtransferringâ a reservation. Thereâs no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, Iâve 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.
It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.
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.
> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once
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.
It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay.
Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more.
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.
Or easiest is to require KYC for all the buyers (tie ticket to person instead of allowing bulk purchases) and limit ability to resale at scale. This would easily allow them to blacklist scalpers. It's not like they don't know who you are from the payment information, and tickets are often verified against driver licenses at entry.
Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy.
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...
Our basic findings suggest that the auctions âworkedâ: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the  fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use,  primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction....
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?
I'm always annoyed by this kind of news. The problem has existed for a long time, and finally, FINALLY, a court weighs in on some very narrow sliver of the problem, meanwhile things keep getting worse.
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.
In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesnât really make you wonder at all. Itâs obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didnât?
this really seems like a naive question. what about this administration dropping the case seems out of place from the rest of the corruption occurring within it? do you honestly think this administration dropping a case in favor of a powerful business instead of fighting for the consumer as anything other than corrupt?
Bribes, campaign donations, presidential ballrooms. The current administration has settled MANY cases that they'd already won, it's very easy to buy favors now.
On the other hand, I'm not sure a European style tribunal would have been allowed to settle the case early.
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?
No matter what your politics, sooner or later someone you don't agree with will be in charge at the national level.
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.
The problem is that the Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch, and due to the burgeoning of the Imperial Presidency over the past several decades, that means that as soon as a new President is voted in, he can order the DoJ to change all their priorities to match his.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.
I feel like we had a golden opportunity, years ago, to do something about Ticketmaster. In 1994 Pearl Jam, one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, boycotted and sued Ticketmaster. I wished at the time more bands had stood up and said, âEnough.â It would have worked.
But itâs easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like theyâre 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.
My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.
I think that's exactly the point. They've charged you $2 to process the request. They did that work. Even if you get the money back for the event, they still did the job, so they won't refund the service fee.
And then the restaurant lobby got the CA one rescinded for restaurant junk fees, which were probably the biggest culprit most people encounter day-to-day.
Because the US espouses the virtues of the free market while embracing monopolies. If they cared about dealing with the latter they would empower more regulators like Lina Khan.
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.
The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. 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 more times a ticket is resold, the better.
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.
Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
Itâs kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops thatâs not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
Thereâs a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time.
Why are concert tickets special?
Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.
Dinner reservations: Iâve literally never had an issue âtransferringâ a reservation. Thereâs no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, Iâve 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.
> Oops thatâs not allowed so now no one gets to go?
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?
The tickets are all electronic now and they can already do it. Most artists don't want them to.
> Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door.
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.
I've seen quite a few artists opposed to it.
Quick example: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWlQS-Dhj7/
It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.
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.
> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once
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.
It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay.
Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more.
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.
Or easiest is to require KYC for all the buyers (tie ticket to person instead of allowing bulk purchases) and limit ability to resale at scale. This would easily allow them to blacklist scalpers. It's not like they don't know who you are from the payment information, and tickets are often verified against driver licenses at entry.
Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy.
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...
Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230
Our basic findings suggest that the auctions âworkedâ: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the  fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use,  primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction....
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?
I'm always annoyed by this kind of news. The problem has existed for a long time, and finally, FINALLY, a court weighs in on some very narrow sliver of the problem, meanwhile things keep getting worse.
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?
> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale
The incentive would be to jack up the prices themselves and take any profit which would have gone to scammers. Supply and demand.
> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company.
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.
In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesnât really make you wonder at all. Itâs obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didnât?
this really seems like a naive question. what about this administration dropping the case seems out of place from the rest of the corruption occurring within it? do you honestly think this administration dropping a case in favor of a powerful business instead of fighting for the consumer as anything other than corrupt?
Sorry, I was being satirical and that doesnât come through always in text. Itâs very obvious why they dropped it because they are corrupt as hell.
Bribes, campaign donations, presidential ballrooms. The current administration has settled MANY cases that they'd already won, it's very easy to buy favors now.
and sign of law enforcement taking tax payer money and not working.
On the other hand, I'm not sure a European style tribunal would have been allowed to settle the case early.
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?
No matter what your politics, sooner or later someone you don't agree with will be in charge at the national level.
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.
The problem is that the Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch, and due to the burgeoning of the Imperial Presidency over the past several decades, that means that as soon as a new President is voted in, he can order the DoJ to change all their priorities to match his.
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.
Alternative sources
- 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)
And live coverage with the reactions of various AGs: https://www.forth.news/stories/Ca6C8cj6TyNe7TMMKUnFX
Matt Stoller is always worth reading.
Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
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.
from the NYT: > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.
I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.
Oh, silly me, that's why a $45 ticket came out to $78 at checkout.
From AP
> 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.
Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
Back in my day, the federal government would break up monopolies.
Used to be they wouldn't allow such mergers to happen in the first place what with the law and all that.
Well, itâs also the courts. The government recently tried to break up Google but the judge refused
Bidens administration was breaking up Google before Trump came in and stopped the breakup.
Elections have consequences.
The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.
Cool, can't wait for the slap on the wrist and a $4 coupon we'll get in 2031.
Venue contracts are a sort of political firewall against any relevant ticketing technology becoming massive globally.
Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.
Lots of festivals are owned or controlled by Live Nation.
https://archive.ph/dfZVv
I feel like we had a golden opportunity, years ago, to do something about Ticketmaster. In 1994 Pearl Jam, one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, boycotted and sued Ticketmaster. I wished at the time more bands had stood up and said, âEnough.â It would have worked.
But itâs easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like theyâre 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.
Now do service fees and 'convenience' fees. Every ticket I buy for a movie somehow costs $2 extra now. (As with everything else). Robbery.
My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.
The one that pisses me off is when the waitress tells you to pay with your phone, and it's charged a "convenience fee."
usually the service fee doesn't even get refunded, which feels additionally foul
I think that's exactly the point. They've charged you $2 to process the request. They did that work. Even if you get the money back for the event, they still did the job, so they won't refund the service fee.
Sure, but imagine a brick and mortar doing that? "we paid our cashier so we can't refund you the full cost"
running the service is the cost of doing business
California, Minnesota, Maryland, and New York have
And then the restaurant lobby got the CA one rescinded for restaurant junk fees, which were probably the biggest culprit most people encounter day-to-day.
Concert seats should be handled the same as airline seats. I can buy the same airline seat from dozens of different places online. Why is that?
Because the US espouses the virtues of the free market while embracing monopolies. If they cared about dealing with the latter they would empower more regulators like Lina Khan.
Airlines need distribution. Concert venues donât.
Mid/high profile venues know they will sell out regardless, they can shop around the venue rights to the highest bidder.
> The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.
I think the decimal point is a few digits too many to the left here... The various "fees" routinely add up to hundreds
That was the first part that jumped out at me.
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.
Well, the AGs need "wins" for their campaigns for governors (a common path). Who cares about right and wrong? I totally get it.
There has been a bunch of reporting on this over the past couple years but will this even effect them?
This is very fork-found-in-kitchen.