Everyone hates Ticketmaster. Why'd Trump go easy on them?

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1:40Nilay Patel:Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil A. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we're talking about the major antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, and what it might mean for antitrust and competition law in general now that the Trump Department of Justice has decided to settle its part of the case, even as several states, including New York, California, and Texas, carry on. To break it all down, I'm joined by Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner. Lauren's our resident court expert, by which I mean she's been in the courtroom chronicling this trial from the beginning.

2:12Nilay Patel:If you're a longtime Decoder listener, you might recall an episode we did on Ticketmaster back in 2023 in the wake of the Taylor Swift era's tour fiasco. That's when Ticketmaster's website crashed during the first major rush for heirs toward tickets. It was such a scandal, and Swifties are so politically powerful, that Live Nation was dragged in front of Congress after widespread backlash spilled over into the mainstream. In 2024, the Biden Department of Justice followed up on that scandal by launching an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, seeking to break it up, to split Ticketmaster off from Live Nation to try and combat predatory practices and increasing ticket fees.

2:47Nilay Patel:This case has always seemed like a slam dunk, regardless of partisan affiliation. Nobody likes Ticketmaster, and breaking up Live Nation would score political points for whoever finally pulled the trigger. It was also supposed to be a sign of strong bipartisan antitrust support. So even though the Trump DOJ featured all new antitrust leaders, there was good reason to believe that those new folks, in particular Trump antitrust chief Gail Slater, would keep up the pressure, especially against tech companies. You might remember that J.D. Vance used to go around calling for the breakup of Google and saying that he was a fan of Biden FTC chief Lena Kahn.

3:22Nilay Patel:But nothing about the second Trump administration is predictable or stable. In early February, following the reports of some major tensions at the DOJ, Gail Slater was pushed out. And then just one week into the Live Nation trial, the DOJ settled its portion of the case, shocking many of the industry and extracting only what many see as pretty weak concessions. Trump himself reportedly intervened in the case directly to demand that speedy settlement, which of course stirred up accusations of outright corruption. But the lawsuit isn't over yet. Because the case against Live Nation included dozens of states, a bunch of attorneys general have refused to give up the fight.

3:59Nilay Patel:So Live Nation remains in court, fighting off accusations that it operates an illegal monopoly in the ticket business, which is illegally tied to its promotions business, which is illegally tied to its venue business. But the DOJ settlement raises all sorts of complicated questions about where antitrust policy stands the United States overall, especially with regard to ongoing cases against big tech companies like Apple and Amazon. Lauren has been tracking all these cases and all these developments in detail. The trial, the settlement, and now the state's continuing the fight. So let's get into it.

4:27Nilay Patel:Before we start, a quick reminder that you can listen to this episode or any episode of Decoder completely ad-free by subscribing to The Verge. Just go to theverge.com slash subscribe. Okay, Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the Live Nation Antitrust lawsuit. Here we go.

4:54Nilay Patel:Lauren Feiner, your senior policy reporter for The Verge and a resident in-courtroom experiencer. Because I think what's happening in courtrooms for you right now is just a full existential experience at all times. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. Spent a lot of time in courtrooms lately. All over the country. There are other cases we can talk about at a later time. The one I want to talk about with you today is the Live Nation case. The United States government is suing Live Nation, which most people know of as Ticketmaster, for antitrust claims. This seemed like a winner. Like, no one is happy with Ticketmaster.

5:26Nilay Patel:This case sort of dates back to Taylor Swift and the Ares Tour. Like, it was very hard to buy an Ares Tour ticket. The sites crashed. Everyone said, well, Ticketmaster is a monopoly, and we stumbled our way into an antitrust case. At a very high level, what is the Department of Justice alleging against Live Nation slash Ticketmaster? In this case, basically, there's two main things we're talking about that the government initially went after Live Nation Ticketmaster for. One thing is that they're saying this company used the fact that it owns both the promotions business, where artists go to have their tours marketed and sold around the country, and their ticketing business, Ticketmaster.

6:06It used the fact that it had both of those to kind of leverage its power with venues across the country. And the second part of this is focused specifically on amphitheaters. Live Nation owns many amphitheaters around the country or it operates them. And because it controls all of those amphitheaters, it's really hard to book an amphitheater tour without going through Live Nation. Those things are ways that Live Nation Ticketmaster essentially is able to have this huge amount of power over the concert industry as we know it today, according to the complaint.

6:42Nilay Patel:So if you're an artist, you have to sign up with Live Nation in order to get access to the venues that it owns. If you run an independent venue and you want to get an artist to come put on a show, you have to sign up to use Ticketmaster for your tickets to get access to those artists. And if you just want ticketing, you maybe have to accept Ticketmaster's offers of artists and rates in order to run their ticketing platform. They're in control of all of it. What has been the argument that that's illegal? Just that it's driving up prices, that it's a bad experience when you're trying to buy a Taylor Swift ticket?

7:12Nilay Patel:What has been the main this is bad argument that the government has presented? In the U.S., it's not illegal to just be a big company and have a lot of power. What is illegal is if you have a dominant share of the market and you use that power in a way that's anti-competitive, that blocks out rivals, that just uses bad behavior basically to break the law and make it so that there's less competition in general. So in this case, you know, some of the things that the government has been talking about that Live Nation Ticketmaster allegedly engages in are things like having these long exclusive contracts with venues that make it hard for other players to get a foothold in those markets or trying to condition the use of one of its services on another.

8:04So that is really hard, again, for other rivals to try to work with those other elements of the concert industry.

8:11Nilay Patel:You were in the courtroom while the DOJ legal team was presenting its case. What did you learn from the evidence that came out of trial? Right now, we're still in the government's case. So we haven't heard Live Nation's full defense yet. But during those first few weeks of trial, some of what we heard was from the CEO of SeatGeek, who said that basically he decided that they needed to offer retaliation insurance to venues they were pursuing as a rival to Ticketmaster to be their primary ticketing provider. Basically, they had to guarantee that if these venues lost shows because Live Nation was refusing to give them to them anymore because they were no longer Ticketmaster customers, that they would be able to make them whole in some way.

9:01We kind of heard a lot about how there were these implicit or maybe not so implicit threats, depending on how you perceive them, that the company allegedly said to rivals or to venues that it was trying to keep under its control, that it was a way that it maintained its power over this whole ecosystem. them.

9:25Nilay Patel:There's some really interesting evidence presented in this case. You actually broke this story. There was some audio of a call from the CEO of Live Nation, Michael Rapinoe, talking to the head of the Barclays Center here in New York. And they're negotiating over whether or not their deal is over and what might happen if the Barclays Center doesn't re-up with Ticketmaster. We actually have the audio. Again, this was exclusively broken on the verge by Lauren. Let's run that here. The question on the ticketing side is there's language in the contract that says if a certain number of games are not played, that the ticketing contract extends at the same terms for an additional year.

10:06Nilay Patel:We don't believe that that clause has been triggered. In COVID, you don't fucking believe it's been triggered, really. Every other team in the entire United States has figured out that has happened. But you don't think with COVID, without one ticketed event, that was triggered? Well, it's not true. It's just not true what you're saying, Michael. But it doesn't deliver us what we need. I've told you that. I've told you. We've got a new venue in town, and the economics have changed in the marketplace. So what I told you from day one was it was going to be a tough time to deliver tickets or concerts with a new competitor in town, regardless of ticketing.

10:42Nilay Patel:Anyways, John, I'm going to go. I'm disappointed. I don't think you were ever going to renew with us. I think you've been set to do a tea cake deal, and I thought we deserved more than this. But anyways, I appreciate your time. All right. Thank you, Michael. Lauren, that's quite a call. We ran it on our Instagram, and people were like, this just sounds like a negotiation. But the government presented that as evidence of monopoly. What were we hearing there? What you heard there was the then-CEO of the Barclays Center, John Abamondi, talking with the CEO of Live Nation, Michael Rapinoe. And basically, Abamondi was breaking the news that Barclays Center was going to go with SeatGeek over Ticketmaster as its ticketing provider after their contract ended.

11:28Now, this was 2021. The Barclays Center believed that their contract with Ticketmaster would expire that year. Michael Rapinoe disagreed. He felt that there was a clause in that contract triggered because of COVID that should have extended the contract. So Live Nation basically says he was mad that Abamondi was interpreting this contract differently, and he believed that they shouldn't be able to get out of their contract this early. And that's why he got so angry there. Abamondi testified that he took this as a threat and that he took Rapinoe bringing up the threat of losing shows to a new competitor in town as a way of Rapinoe saying, well, if you don't go with Ticketmaster, then, you know, maybe we just won't send you these shows.

12:18Nilay Patel:And that feels like the tying, right? If you don't sign up for Ticketmaster, the artists that we represent at Live Nation won't come through Barclays Center. They'll go to another venue. Exactly. In the courtroom, did that go over as the government intended it to? Could you tell if that was convincing? We actually heard Live Nation bring up this call in their opening argument, which was interesting because I think that kind of primed us to hear this F-bomb that was alluded to in Live Nation's opening. So I think when we heard it, in a way, it hits a little bit differently because the F-bomb kind of comes at a time that's not really part of this whole UBS arena discussion.

12:55It's about this anger over this clause in the contract being triggered. But at the same time, I think you do, with the context from Abamondi, understand how he might have interpreted this as a threat. But I could definitely see the jury interpreting it either way. I think as we've seen in those Instagram comments, some people think this is just how business goes, and other people think this is an inherent threat.

13:20Nilay Patel:We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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17:33Nilay Patel:We're back with Verge senior policy reporter Lorne Feiner. The case is proceeding. The evidence is being presented. People are taking a stand. And then it settles. The DOJ settles. The states decide to keep going. But the DOJ settles. You wrote a piece about that settlement, just a straightforward headline. The Live Nation Settlement Has Industry Insiders Baffled. You talked to a whole bunch of people about that settlement in the industry, around the industry. Explain why the reaction was bafflement. First of all, I think when the settlement came out, it was a pretty chaotic day in court. The judge didn't know what was going on.

18:08Even trial attorneys there somewhat didn't seem to know what was going on. But the DOJ, and I think it's about eight states, decided to settle, and the rest of a couple dozen or so states are continuing on. But what was reached in that settlement, when I talked to people in the industry about it, they basically said, we don't really know who asked for this. A lot of the things that were in the settlement were things that they felt were just not that helpful or wouldn't really fundamentally change the dynamics of the industry. They did say there were a few things that did seem like they would be better than the status quo, like more transparency for artists on ticket sales, on their own ticket sales, and certain caps on ticket fees.

18:55But then other things they felt like were just either so minimal that it didn't do enough or something that they didn't even really want, like, you know, access to Ticketmaster's back end for other rivals to plug into in certain cases, which we heard at trial that back end is something that's like out of the 1980s, one of the witnesses testified about. And the other thing was that they have to divest a certain number of exclusive booking contracts for amphitheaters. They're not actually divesting any amphitheaters. They're just saying that other promoters can book into them, essentially.

19:36Nilay Patel:There's a lot of reporting that Donald Trump personally was involved in this settlement. Ari Emanuel, who used to be a board member at Live Nation, called Trump and personally asked him to intervene. There's reporting from the Wall Street Journal that says Trump was just walking around saying, why isn't this settled yet? How much Donald Trump is in the settlement? If you go based off of the Wall Street Journal reporting, it sounds like Trump was ushering this along. And, you know, we got the settlement about a week or so into trial. It sounded like there was a meeting at the White House based on the Wall Street Journal report where some of this came together.

20:12So it sounds like there was a significant amount of involvement based on that report. It's pretty unusual to see a president involved in something like this at that level. Typically, antitrust cases are resolved, whether they're brought to trial or settled, based on the antitrust laws. And that's something that's done at the staff level and then at the political appointee level within the DOJ. Now, of course, like, that's not something that we've heard from the DOJ or Live Nation. I think the DOJ would say this is something we came to based off of our understanding of antitrust law and the best deal that we thought we could get.

20:51That's going to be the big question, especially as we see the judge review the settlement as part of the Tunney Act review, where he has to basically determine, is this in the public interest?

21:01Nilay Patel:Until the DOJ settled, this case felt like a win no matter what your politics were. Like no one likes Ticketmaster. I feel like specifically after the Eras Tour disaster and artists starting to complain pretty widely about Ticketmaster and so many who started to complain, the idea that antitrust enforcement was bipartisan was on the rise. Right? There were some conservatives who were really excited about antitrust enforcement. You have Andrew Ferguson, who's the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who makes antitrust noises all the time. He replaced Lena Kahn. J.D. Vance was at events that you've covered for us where he said he actually liked Lena Kahn.

21:41Nilay Patel:She was the only member of the Biden administration that he liked and thought was doing a good job because she was trying to preserve competition. What has changed? Because it feels like not going after the one that everyone hates is a big change. Yeah, it does feel like a big change. I think the tides of how antitrust enforcement works in the U.S. have changed with this administration. I think they have still talked a lot about wanting to go after big tech and go after big corporate power, but they're much more conciliatory in certain ways in terms of their tone, in terms of their willingness to pursue settlements.

22:19You know, I think we heard a lot from Lena Kahn and Jonathan Cantor under the Biden administration that they weren't so into settling cases. They weren't really interested in that. They were interested in pushing the boundaries of how antitrust law is interpreted. And you do that through bringing cases. And that doesn't really seem to be the MO of this administration. And then we kind of have a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes where, you know, right before this case kicked off, we saw the head of the DOJ antitrust division at the time, Gail Slater, leaving that post. And it was kind of unusual how it happened.