Live music experts expect the US Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation to take years to resolve, given the breadth of claims against the concert giant and various stakeholders in the live music ecosystem.
“It will take a few years, at least” Lee Hepner, senior counsel for the antitrust group American Economic Liberties Project, said at the NIVA 2024 conference in New Orleans on Tuesday (June 4). The conference is organized by the National Independent Venue Association, which was founded in 2020 to secure federal government funding during the pandemic. The upside, for Hepner and other speakers on the panel called Ticket Tyranny: The Unseen Grip of Market Dominance, is the “enormous potential for industry restructuring.”
Ant Taylorfounder and CEO of rival ticketing company Lyte, agreed on Tuesday, saying: “Given how big the scope is [of the DOJ lawsuit] is, it's going to be hard to see… What I'm excited about right now is the opportunity we have as an ecosystem to look at—not just Live Nation—but to look at how we do business together and the conditions in which Live Nation has thrived on.”
Specifically, Taylor added, “What is the business model of ticketing and why, for 40 years, has there been so little innovation around it?”
Ticketmaster has been a dominant force in the ticketing industry for decades – its 2010 merger with Live Nation only strengthened its position in the US market. The DOJ's lawsuit alleges that Live Nation-Ticketmaster “unlawfully maintained monopolies in many concert promotions and primary ticket markets and engaged in other exclusionary conduct affecting live concert venues, including arenas and amphitheaters.” A major concern for the DOJ and the group of 30 states that jointly filed the lawsuit on May 23 is Live Nation's “flywheel model,” which the DOJ describes as a “self-perpetuating business model that captures the fees and revenues from concert fans and sponsorship , uses that revenue to lock artists into exclusive promotion deals, and then uses its strong cache of live content to sign venues to long-term exclusive ticketing deals, starting the cycle all over again .”
Unlike the consent decree Live Nation has been under since the merger, which was designed to prevent abuse of the company's position, Kevin Ericksondirector of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Future of Music Coalition, told the audience that he believes the DOJ's lawsuit focuses on the right parties affected by the alleged monopoly: artists, venues and fans.
“Even with the best of intentions, a consent decree is insufficient to address the potential harm,” Erickson said. “It shifts the burden of enforcement to the people who have the least power. It forces artists and artists' representatives and people in the field to watch for antitrust violations.”
Hepner explained that the Future of Music Coalition has been collecting such complaints against Live Nation for years and encouraged those in the room to contact the DOJ with additional complaints as the lawsuit moves through the court system.
If the DOJ lawsuit is successful and Live Nation is forced to divest Ticketmaster, attendees expressed hope that without the promoter's financial backing, competition in ticketing will flourish, allowing for innovation and ending exclusive ticketing contracts frequently used by Ticketmaster and other big ticket outlets.
Panelist Gary Witt, chairman and CEO of Pabst Theater Group, emphasized the importance of eliminating Ticketmaster's dominance due to growing customer dissatisfaction. “It's not about your experience when the customer comes through the door. It's not about the artist experience when they come backstage. It's about the initial ticketing experience,” Witt told the audience.
The mainstream ticket market has become “a closed market and allows for zero innovation,” Witt said, adding, “We have an industry to save here.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/live-nation-doj-lawsuit-experts-industry-to-save-niva/
