Could Hollywood Actually De-Monopolize?

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0:19Matt Belloni:This episode of The Town is presented to you by AMC Networks. Billy Magnuson and Zach Galifianakis star in the new series The Audacity on AMC and AMC+. Influence rises, people unravel, and CEO meltdowns are business as usual among Silicon Valley elite. Executive produced by Jonathan Glatzer, a writer-producer of Succession and Better Call Saul. Watch new episodes of The Audacity, Sundays exclusively on AMC and AMC+. It is Monday, April 20th. Some big news last week for those in Hollywood who think that big media is getting too big. The federal judge blocked the$6.2 billion merger of two television station giants, Nexstar and Tegna.

1:03Matt Belloni:Those are TV station owners, not networks, and the deal would allow the combined company to reach 60 % of the country's TV households. That's well above the limit of 39 % that's currently in place. but the FCC commissioner, our guy Brendan Carr. He granted a waiver because he and Donald Trump see the more conservative station owners as better for their agenda than the more liberal network news operators. But even though the federal government blessed this deal, eight states and DirecTV sued on antitrust grounds. And a judge in California agreed, saying the combo would likely cause consumers pay TV bills to rise and local news coverage to suffer.

1:43Matt Belloni:Station groups will appeal, of course, but that is not the only antitrust ruling last week. Live Nation lost its jury trial. The federal jury last week determined that it indeed operated as a monopoly by owning Ticketmaster and booking the venues for which Ticketmaster sells tickets. Restricted competition, and it drives up ticket costs, according to the jury. Live Nation is also vowing to appeal, and it's unclear what the impact will be on ticket prices or even whether the judge will force a breakup of the company. It seems unlikely. But remember, the federal government also agreed to settle here, and that settlement is still being worked out.

2:21Matt Belloni:So it's again, these states that chose to fight Live Nation, and at least for now, have come out on top. So is this a new twist in how big media mergers are going to be treated with the balance of power now shifting to the states that seem to be much more skeptical of big media than the federal government? And most importantly, for people in Hollywood, what does all this mean for Paramount's pending$110 billion deal to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery? The Trump administration seems to be on board with that one, and the Ellisons have obviously greased the Trump administration as well. But the blue states are preparing to sue, according to multiple reports.

3:00Matt Belloni:Of course, all those Hollywood people who signed the petition to block the merger, that's 3 ,000 and counting, they'd very much like the antitrust tide to turn against warnermount can it happen that's the question we've got for lucas shaw who's back here our monday guy he's here to discuss it's tegna next star live nation paramount warner brothers and the antitrust impact on it all from the ringer and puck i'm matt belony and this is the town

3:31Matt Belloni:okay we are here with lucas shaw from bloomberg welcome back lucas we missed you in vegas is you know what one day they'll get me back but they have to they have to put me on stage with a bunch of uh a-listers like you uh yes it was fun i did a couple panels one of them has run on the show last week john favreau we got another one coming this week it was a good time people were very nice craig got carded it was a whole thing did you come away from the john favreau conversation feeling more or less optimistic about mandalorian and grogu more more he knows what he's doing and And he showed me back in LA, I went and checked out his like shooting area where he shot a lot of the live action stuff and the prop area and very cool stuff.

4:17Matt Belloni:And the footage they showed, for me at least, was a big improvement over the trailer. It felt a lot more cinematic than the trailer did. So hopefully they can communicate that to the audience. But yeah. And you didn't go to Coachella second week. I did not. Yeah, I've had too many random New York trips. You got to go back there. My favorite moment from Coachella was when Sabrina Carpenter brought out Madonna. And there were a lot of tweets and posts from Gen Z people asking who she was. Who is this? Who is this lady? Yeah. Craig, do you know who Madonna is? I've heard of her, yeah. Yeah. Okay, good.

4:58Matt Belloni:Did you know that? Do you know who directed the Vogue video, Craig? No, I don't. David Fincher oh wow there's a whole there was a whole online thing about how when Madonna came out and they were doing like a prayer with Sabrina everybody in the crowd no one is dancing and everybody's just standing still with their phones out well there was a whole strain of criticism of the Coachella crowds from people at home but I will say having spoken to people who were there the phone the phone thing is a real issue where the crowds are just everyone is just trying to capture everything which is funny Because all of the performances now are constructed for video.

5:37And that means you have these huge screens behind all the artists, but they're like looking at the screens and sometimes taking video of the screen. Because if you're far back in the crowd, which I've been. You can't see the singer. Well, also, but your video of the stage is going to be awful.

5:53Matt Belloni:It's an epidemic. They look like zombies. No one is moving and everybody's trying to get the perfect shot, even though you could just go on YouTube and watch it and you have it at home. I don't understand filming concerts because literally every single one of them is on YouTube they should make it like the masters, no phones that would be great, although people would die they would literally die I get wanting to take photos with your friends or of the artwork that my friend puts together but the taking photos and video of live performance as an amateur almost never works just stick to getting photos and videos of yourself in a wellness tent Like that's where the real value is.

6:32I like that you think there are a bunch of wellness tents at Coachella. There are. Kourtney Kardashian had one and it blew over in the sandstorm.

6:40Matt Belloni:I saw a video of that. Okay. Enough of that. Let's talk even sexier than Coachella, a TV station merger. We are going to talk antitrust today, but I want to start. You didn't want to transition into the music antitrust. You wanted to go into the TV antitrust. We're starting with the sexiest of all, Tenga Nextstar. Tegna. Two companies that most people have never heard of. They own many TV stations around the country. The FCC, Trump's guy, Brendan Carr, he's very interested in allowing them to merge. He thinks that these more conservative-oriented companies are going to be a check on the lamestream media and the liberal bent of the networks.

7:26Matt Belloni:He wants them to merge and have stations in 60 % of the market. This judge made a very interesting argument in blocking it, claiming not only that this was illegal from an antitrust perspective, but also that it would harm the news business and the news output of these companies. I think this is all kind of silly to still be talking in 2026 about the power of TV stations when most people get their news and information and entertainment over the internet. So I don't quite understand the rationale here. I know the antitrust people love this and they see it as a influential potential, um, Harbinger for the Paramount Warner merger, which we'll talk about, but am I crazy here that this is a big nothing burger merger?

8:21uh it's not a nothing burger i i understand the point you're making and i think macro i agree that like sweating about consolidation among tv networks or even some of these media companies you know paramount and warner brothers when meta owns facebook and instagram and whatsapp or alphabet owns google and youtube and what whatever gemini will grow into and you know you all the things that Amazon and Apple and these tech companies have, they have so many touch points that if you really want to kind of regulate power and control, you should worry about them. That being said, it does influence customers if you have one company owning so many local stations.

9:06And to your point about news, like one of the things that my colleague Kelsey Griffith reported was how they were going to be used, like they want to use News Nation segments instead of the ABC, NBC news broadcast.

9:19Matt Belloni:Because Nextar owns News Nation and then they will have stations to plug their product on. It is a little funny, sad, pick your word, when like Brendan Carr and the Trump administration rail on these media companies for being left-leaning, but then say it's like a good thing if a company is trying to actively put more conservative programming on the airwaves. um so yeah i think are you saying that the trump administration is hypocritical i'm sorry who would get out episode over yeah um i so i i guess i think it these deals all merit scrutiny it doesn't mean that they need to be blocked but i don't think that we should just like wave them through and celebrate them like the fcc seems to want us to yeah they're definitely celebrating and 60 % is a lot.

10:09Matt Belloni:And, and, you know, you and I talk about the news environment in a very sophisticated way with all the different digital outlets and everything for a lot of Americans, their local TV station is their local news. And when you get one company owning a lot of the different options, it does make a difference. It does stifle that, you know, marketplace of ideas where you could have multiple networks or multiple stations in a market that might give you different perspectives. Yeah. Or in an election year where people are still going to be watching a lot of their local news and most people, let's say over 65 or 70 are, you know, not consuming their news on Instagram.

10:53If one station is telling them how to think it matters or if one company, I should say.

10:58Matt Belloni:So now this goes to the ninth circuit where they're going to have to evaluate whether this is an illegal merger, whether this is going to hurt the market for television and for news. And, you know, it just depends, like all these antitrust cases, what they consider to be the market here. Because if you're looking at the market for television stations, it seems pretty clear it is illegal. They specifically wrote an exemption or a waiver to the rule that you can't own more than 39 % to specifically benefit this merger. They didn't overturn the rule, which they could have tried to do. They just granted a waiver.

11:41They had made noise about overturning that rule. And then I think they realized that if they overturned that rule, like overturning the rule would be more of a headache, complicated, and it could also invite deals that they don't want. Doing it this way, where they just grant waivers to the people that they like, allows them to basically pick and choose who can merge. Right.

11:58Matt Belloni:But that smells bad if you are a federal judge on an appeals court when you're trying to evaluate whether a merger is fair or not. And the government is basically opening up the valve for one preferred merger to go through and then closing it back up for everyone else. Yeah. Well, it's like all these antitrust cases, right? When we were talking about Netflix Warner Brothers, there was this big debate about like, what is the market, right? Is the market just streaming? In which case, maybe this is anti-competitive. Is the market all of television? In which case, that's a little fuzzier. Or is it like all of entertainment?

12:33In which case, it's clearly not anti-competitive. And the same with this one. Are we talking about just local TV stations? Which, to your point, I think this would be seen as problematic. Are we talking about all of television? Are we talking about all of entertainment? And there will be people making the arguments on both sides.

12:47Matt Belloni:They should get Ted Sarandos in there to make the argument that they're competing with sleep. That they're competing. That was a Reed Hastings one. But they could. I know, but Netflix would bring the competitive environment to be everything. We're competing with TikTok. We're competing with Amazon. We're competing with, yes. Yes, your local weather person is competing with TikTok. So it's kind of true, though, these days. All right, let's move on to Live Nation, because this is the second big antitrust ruling of the past week. The federal jury in New York found that Ticketmaster unlawfully maintained a monopoly in primary ticketing for the major concert venues.

13:26Matt Belloni:Live Nation had acquired monopoly power in large amphitheaters, although this is a somewhat narrower claim. And they said that Live Nation engaged in illegal tying in the amphitheaters, as the states have argued, the company does not allow competitors to engage in promoting concerts at its venues. Pretty big deal, right? Yeah, well, it's like with the Nextar Techno when we were talking about a case where sort of the federal government had a point of view and other people said, sorry, we don't agree, right? Where the DOJ decided to settle with Live Nation. It was very controversial. You know, it was right on the eve of this trial.

14:07I think the trial had just started.

14:10Matt Belloni:And Trump basically said, what's going on here? Right. Why is this not settled? Ari Emanuel got in his ear. Ari Emanuel, good friends with Michael Rapinoe, said, what are you doing here? Trump then goes and tells his DOJ, settle this thing. And lo and behold, it's settled. Gail Slater quits, was fired. She was the antitrust chief of the DOJ. And some of the states, because most of the states had signed on to this lawsuit, some Some of the states agreed with Trump, but most of them said, you know what, we're going to continue with this. This is a winning political issue for us because this is a rare bipartisan thing.

14:46Nobody likes Ticketmaster. Yeah, not all Democratic states. No, no, no. It was a bipartisan effort against it. And the other unusual part of this is that it was a jury trial, which is one of the reasons why I think they lost is, I mean, setting aside whether you think they're a monopoly or not, like if you ask a bunch of jurors, what do you think of Live Nation and Ticketmaster? They're going to say, fuck those guys. Yes, exactly.

15:07Matt Belloni:I know. That's why it's so amazing because it was so obvious. You get Ticketmaster in front of a jury. It doesn't matter. You could say that they ran over a raccoon in front of your house and they would say, yes, yes, Ticketmaster is guilty. Yeah, we do. We do not like these people. They do not do right by us. I don't like how much I pay. I don't like fees. I don't like any of this. You know, one of the most hated companies in America. And we've talked about this. You know, there's lots of different reasons why ticket prices are high. Some of them are, I believe, the way that the business has evolved and the fact that Live Nation owns a lot of parts of it.

15:42Matt Belloni:A bigger part is that the artists like to charge a lot. And there's more demand than there are seats. And the artists take advantage of that. If they don't do it, the secondary market will. So that's where you get high prices. But Ticketmaster is the boogeyman of the music business. It's a dominant player. And this was a very embarrassing kind of spectacle for Live Nation and Ticketmaster because you had all of these kind of emails and comments paraded that made its executives look bad. You had Slack messages. Yeah, you had a lot. You had the executives who were sort of laughing at how they were, what they were, the prices that they were getting people to pay.

16:21Those guys did not get fired, by the way. I think there's still an internal investigation happening and that they will get they will probably at least one of them will probably get fired in like six months. They were celebrating, basically saying, how high can we go? These people are idiots. Yeah. And you had, you know, you had what seemed like the CEO, Michael Rapinoe, threatening Barclays, that Barclays Center in Brooklyn, that if you, you know, you break with Ticketmaster, we're going to shift concerts away from you from Live Nation, which is like kind of a lot of what this whole case centered on.

16:53Live Nation is obviously going to appeal, which is why I don't think there will be one of a few reasons. I don't think there will be much immediate impact because Live Nation is going to try to drag this out as long as they can, I would imagine, unless they get the sense that the judge isn't going to be especially punitive in whatever the remedies are.

17:12Matt Belloni:Well, that's the thing is the remedies phase. now, the judge has to decide whether to break these companies up, which I think seems unlikely, or whether to impose some enormous fine or other potential remedies. This episode is brought to you by HBO Max. Half-Man, the new HBO original limited series from Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gad, examines the tumultuous relationship between two estranged brothers, tracking the highs and lows of the pair over the course of 40 years. starring Emmy Award winner Richard Gad and BAFTA Award winner Jamie Bell. Half-Man premieres April 23 on HBO Max. Half-Man premieres April 23 on HBO Max.

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18:26Matt Belloni:I want to go two things here. One, how do you think the appeal will go? And let's first start with, what is the impact here on regular consumers, music fans? because they only found that the overcharging was$1.72 per ticket. Yeah, so I think the public understanding of this trial and what the trial is actually about are different in that a lot of the saber rattling and political stunts over the last few years when it comes to live music have been inspired by ticket prices and the Taylor Swift on sale is a mess and tickets are too expensive. the Bruce Springsteen on sale. Tickets are too expensive.

19:08A lot of it is about the pricing and a lot of it is about the difficulty of accessing tickets. And despite kind of the best efforts of Live Nation Ticketmaster's rivals to say that breaking them up will solve that, I just don't think that's true, right? You talked about this a little bit. It may help certain areas on the margin and maybe it would lead to a dramatic overhaul of live music that I'm not anticipating. But ticket prices are high because there's limited supply and inexhaustible demand. And so that market as a whole has gone up. You look across the experience economy, it's not just live music.

19:43The tickets, the cost of sporting events, the cost of theme parks, all this stuff is more and more expensive because people are willing to pay it. And of all of those experiences, music is kind of the most rare, right? You and I are both Dodger fans. You want to go to a Dodger game this year, you got 81 options. When Rosalia comes to town at the end of June, I think she's doing two shows. So it's just, I do not see this bringing the prices way down. If they have forced it to sell off Ticketmaster, or if they continue to break up this notion of exclusivity, there will be more competition among the different ticket sellers.

20:20And that may benefit customers. We just don't know exactly how.

20:25Matt Belloni:And they make the argument that that might actually not benefit customers. that if given the choices here, most of the artists choose Live Nation because they are the most efficient and they have the best people and yada, yada, yada. So if you open this up, maybe it's going to actually lead to higher prices. Yeah. It's a very weird circular argument that you sometimes have because people definitely make the point that you just did, which is that Live Nation or Ticketmaster is the best product. And then the other ticketing companies say, well, we would be better products if it was more competitive and thus we could get more money and we could invest in our product.

21:01And it's always hard to prove that kind of negative. So I don't fully know the answer. But we do know that there are four or five different ticketing companies in the marketplace and their products are anywhere from equivalent to worse. I know.