Live Nation Settlement with DOJ Stirs ‘Bad Blood’ with State-Level Skeptics

The entertainment industry’s trial of the century started with a bang and ended with a whimper. 

On Monday, the US Justice Department announced a tentative settlement in its monopoly case against Live Nation, a shocking development for a years-in-the-making case that just entered a jury trial last week. While the DOJ and dozens of states initially sought a full break-up of Live Nation and Ticketmaster when they filed the lawsuit in May 2024, it now seems the Live Nation-Ticketmaster band may stay together. Much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone else in the live events industry, from concert venue owners to Kid Rock and millions of Swifties.

Strike Three?

According to sources who spoke to The New York Times, the settlement agreement calls for Live Nation to let venues use multiple ticket vendors (rather than Ticketmaster exclusively), and allow touring artists to use promoters other than Live Nation when performing in one of the roughly 460 Live Nation-owned venues. 

It’s hardly the first time the government has tried to modify the company’s behavior without tearing it apart:

• When the government approved the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger back in 2010, the newly formed entity signed a consent decree in which it agreed not to leverage the power of its touring business to coerce venues into using Ticketmaster. In 2019, after Live Nation was found to have repeatedly violated the consent decree, the DOJ and the company agreed to a new consent decree that strengthened the language of the previous edition.
• It apparently wasn’t strong enough. During the trial last week, the DOJ played a recording of a phone conversation in which Live Nation Chief Executive Officer Michael Rapino appeared to threaten to take concerts away from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn if the venue moved forward with plans to switch from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek.

The Show Might Go On: The tentative settlement still requires sign-off from US District Judge Arun Subramanian, who appeared quite unhappy when told Monday that the two sides had discreetly struck an agreement the previous Thursday without informing the court. The settlement calls for a maximum damages payout of $280 million if all 39 states (plus Washington, DC) that joined the DOJ in the lawsuit agree to it. That looks unlikely. In a statement on Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James said that at least 26 states and DC were planning on moving forward with the trial, arguing the settlement “fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case.” 

The divergent path puts the case in “uncharted ground” in monopolization case law, Loyola University Chicago School of Law Professor Spencer Waller told The Daily Upside. “The tradition is if the government shows that a company has durable market power and is engaged in unlawful or exclusionary acts, they win,” Waller said. “The remedy has been break-up.”