Live nation
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Irving Azoff teed off on scalpers, Stubhub and the federal government in a no-holds-barred panel Wednesday during the Pollstar Live conference at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. Azoff, along with artist Garth Brooks, MSG Entertainment chairman James Dolan and former top Department of Justice antitrust official Makan Delrahim, took the federal government to task for the way it handled last month’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on ticketing. Despite evidence that the problems linked to the ticket sale were the result of a massive bot attack, most senators at the hearing blamed Ticketmaster for service disruptions and tried to link customer dissatisfaction with the ticket sale to antitrust allegations that the company is operating as a monopoly.
Delrahim, who investigated Live Nation and Ticketmaster on behalf of the Department of Justice in 2019, told his fellow panelists that Congress was convoluting two separate issues and “were well intentioned, but didn’t understand the issues” facing the primary ticketing business. Azoff was more aggressive in his comments. He said most problems in ticketing were “likely perpetrated by scalpers” who “steal massive amounts of tickets” and pay lobbyists to “to demonize Ticketmaster, and actually make laws to support and protect scalpers instead of artists or fans.”
The panel was a call for unity within the music business after the senate hearing left many in live entertainment feeling rattled, including many of Live Nation’s own competitors.
The touring community has stayed silent through most of the sector’s controversies in the post-pandemic period – including consumer frustration over high prices for Adele, Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182 tickets – leaving Ticketmaster to take most of the incoming barrage. And the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed — to many people’s surprise — how angry and often misinformed politicians are with Ticketmaster, and by extension, the concert industry writ large.
The panel was held during an annual conference sponsored by Pollstar, a long-running trade publication now owned by Azoff, Tim Leiweke and the Oak View Group. Wednesday’s panel was the concert businesses’ first attempt to create a unified voice between buildings, artists, promoters and ticketing companies and to launch a new offensive targeting scalpers who, as Brooks pointed out, are becoming increasingly effective at using bots to “slow the system down so people get frustrated and immediately head to the secondary markets.” Dolan noted scalpers have made it very difficult to get tickets into the hands of people “who don’t have seven figure incomes.”
No artist “wants their fans to have to pay for a ticket that is exponentially higher than face value,” Azoff said. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Washington isn’t focused on the real issue — screwing artists and their fans. Our government has a long history of screwing artists.” Add in the explosion of fraudulent and misleading ticketing sites and the scourge of speculative ticket listings, and it’s easy to see why Azoff, Dolan and the other panelists are alarmed about the growth of the secondary ticketing business.
They’re not wrong, but the situation may also not be as dire as Azoff and his compatriots want to make it seem. Unlike sports ticketing where nearly all non-season-ticket sales are handled by a small cadre of elite brokers, the concert business has been highly effective at delegitimizing the secondary ticketing industry and preventing sites like StubHub from gaining direct access to ticketing inventory. Brokers have further been stymied by initiatives like Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan and SafeTix, which have proven effective at reducing the number of tickets sold on the primary market. In fact, the primary ticketing business’ success at stopping the secondary industry less than a decade ago is why most scalpers are now resorting to such extreme measures to procure tickets.
This is mostly good news for Azoff. His worst fears about the growth of the secondary ticketing market have not materialized, and today the industry has been marginalized and to the point that some actors have resorted to illegal acts to procure tickets.
As Delrahim explained, there are already existing laws on the books and “all sorts of limits” the government can place on scalpers. Existing securities law regulating the short selling of stocks could be applied to speculative ticket listings, noting that prosecutors with the Southern District of New York have “already brought a number of prosecutions” for what he calls “naked short selling.” There are also Federal Trade Commission laws banning “deceptive and unfair practices” that could be better enforced.
“The FTC should open an investigation against speculative ticket sellers who go online and try to sell tickets way before they have been sold – that’s a clear violation of the artist rights,” he added.
Compelling the government to enforce its own laws is difficult, though, and Live Nation and Ticketmaster are not equipped to slow down the bad behavior of the secondary ticketing industry on its own. Instead, Azoff made a rare plea to the audience of touring business professionals for help.
“If you agree with us,” he said, “you all have work to do because there’s a lot of weird bills being proposed out there and the people in this room have a chance to go out and let fans be heard. Ultimately, this is going to be decided at the local and municipal level and that’s where all of us need to bring the fight.”
Live Nation’s 2022 was record-breaking across basically all key metrics — revenue, concert attendance, gross transaction value and sponsorships were all at all-time highs — and the company expects 2023 to top that.
As the company reported Thursday (Feb) with its fourth quarter earnings, total revenue reached a record $16.7 billion in 2022 — up 44% from the pre-pandemic era of 2019. That growth was spread across a number of factors: more fans, more concerts, more spending per fan, higher average ticket prices and a greater number of large sponsors.
Adjusted operating income improved 49% to $1.4 billion over the year, and operating free cash flow rose nearly four-fold to $1.8 billion.
Concert revenue in 2022 was $13.49 billion, up 43.1% from 2019 and 185.8% more than 2021. Concert attendance reached 121 million fans in 2022, up 24% from 2019 and a 246% increase from 2021, a year Live Nation began to recover from the pandemic but was not yet at full strength. The concerts division put on 43,600 events in 2022, up 153.2% from 2021 and up 8.4% from 2019. Attendance for Venue Nation, the venues operated by Live Nation, reached almost 50 million.
Ticketing revenues of $2.24 billion was up 44.9% from 2019 and up 97.4% from 2021. Fee-bearing ticket volume rose 28% from 2019 to 280 million. Fee-bearing gross transaction value grew to $28 billion, up more than 50% from 2019.
The average ticket costs were higher in 2022, too. With more tickets priced dynamically to true market value, Live Nation estimates $700 million was shifted to artists (and, presumably, away from the secondary market). That said, the average entry price for tickets remained below $35 in the U.S.
Even though consumers felt the pinch of high inflation throughout 2022, music fans didn’t shy away from spending money at Live Nation concerts. Ancillary per-fan spending rose at least 20% across all venue types from 2019 levels.
Sponsorship revenue reached $968 million, up 64% from 2019 and 135% greater than 2021. Live Nation had 120 large sponsors globally, up 32% from 2019. Last year, the company added PayPal, GoPuff, Hulu and Snap as sponsors. They and other new, large sponsors accounted for 80% of sponsorship’s revenue growth in 2022.
Live Nation points to a number of leading indicators that suggest 2023 will be even stronger than 2022. As of mid-February, event-related deferred revenue — tickets sales for concerts that have not yet occurred — was up $400 million to $2.7 billion. Also through mid-February, ticket sales are up 20% and fee-bearing gross transaction value of tickets sold is up 33%.
Jason Miller is moving from Live Nation to Outback Presents, where he has taken the role of GM of the North East Division to help grow the independent promoter’s business.
Miller, most recently executive vp at Live Nation Entertainment, is a veteran of the live entertainment industry with more than 30 years of experience. Over the course of his career, he’s produced events for top artists and entertainers at the iconic venues including Madison Square Garden, Barclays Center, Prudential Center, Radio City Music Hall, Citi Field, Yankee Stadium, Carnegie Hall, The Beacon Theatre, Northwell Health at Jones Beach, MetLife Stadium and Central Park’s Great Lawn and SummerStage.
“This is a tremendous moment for me personally and professionally,” Miller said in a release. “The new position allows me to return to my creative roots and independent spirit. I’m proud to be able to continue working with world-class artists and events.”
Miller was with Live Nation for 16 years out of New York. While there, he worked with such major artists as Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Prince, Lady Gaga, George Michael, Mariah Carey, Dead & Company, Swedish House Mafia, Iron Maiden, Guns N’ Roses, Lenny Kravitz, Sheryl Crow, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Eminem, Radiohead, Jay-Z and Rage Against The Machine.
“Jason carries decades of knowledge, history, and integrity along with a vast pool of experience promoting and producing the highest class of events in North America,” said Outback Presents’ Mike Smardak, Brian Dorfman and Vaughn Millette in a joint statement. “We are proud to foster his creative spirit and thrive in a new era of live entertainment.”
Outback’s team has also recently grown with the hires of Everett Ramsey and Hardy McBee, formerly of Beaver Productions, as well as Fallon Nell, who returned to Outback after stints in both artist management and at Belmont University.
A federal appeals court on Monday (Feb. 13) rejected an antitrust lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster and Live Nation of exploiting its “impregnable market power” to foist inflated prices on hundreds of thousands of fans, ruling that concertgoers forfeited their right to sue when they bought their tickets.
In a 24-page ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an earlier ruling that dismissed the proposed class action, saying that when the fans purchased their tickets, they had agreed to settle any disputes with Ticketmaster via private arbitration rather than in open court.
On appeal, attorneys for the plaintiffs had challenged the validity of that agreement, arguing it had not been presented clearly enough to customers. But in Monday’s decision, the appeals court was unswayed.
“At three independent stages — when creating an account, signing into an account, and completing a purchase — Ticketmaster and Live Nation webpage users are presented with a confirmation button above which text informs the user that, by clicking on this button, ‘you agree to our Terms of Use,’” Judge Danny J. Boggs wrote for a panel of three judges. “A reasonable user would have seen the notice and been able to locate the terms via hyperlink.”
The ruling came as Live Nation and Ticketmaster are facing heightened scrutiny over their market power in the wake of a disastrous November rollout of tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
The incident, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes, has prompted calls from lawmakers in Washington D.C. to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged to create their current structure in 2010. It has also spawned investigations from attorneys general around the country and at least two antitrust class actions. The DOJ is also reportedly investigating Live Nation for antitrust violations, though the probe predated the Swift tour debacle.
The case decided on Monday was filed back in 2020 but raised similar accusations to critics who have spoken out in the wake of the Swift incident. Aiming to represent “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of customers, the proposed class action alleged that Live Nation’s dominance allowed it to increase prices for consumers and perform other “predatory acts” — calling it a “monster” that “must be stopped.”
“Defendants’ anticompetitive scheme has been wildly successful and today threatens to put nearly all ticketing services for major concert venues (primary and secondary) in the United States under Ticketmaster’s monopolistic thumb,” the accusers wrote in their April 2020 complaint.
But the case was quickly tossed out. A federal judge ruled in 2021 that Live Nation and Ticketmaster users had clearly assented to a form of so-called clickwrap agreement — a common online tool that presents users with terms of service before proceeding — that required them to resolve any such claims against Live Nation via a private arbitration process.
Monday’s ruling upheld that decision for Live Nation. The appeals court said the company’s agreement was not the kind of “pure clickwrap” that offers users the clearest presentation of terms of service, but the court said it also was not “browsewrap” — a less effective form of user agreement where terms are “hidden in links located at the bottom of webpages.” Whatever the format, the appeals court said Live Nation’s version “did enough” to pass legal muster.
“Appellees’ notice is conspicuously displayed directly above or below the action button at each of three independent stages that a user must complete before purchasing tickets,” Judge Boggs wrote for the court. “Crucially, the ‘Terms of Use’ hyperlink is conspicuously distinguished from the surrounding text in bright blue font, making its presence readily apparent.”
The ruling will effectively end the current case, but a second similar lawsuit against Live Nation (filed by the same team of attorneys from the law firm Quinn Emmanuel) based on slightly tweaked allegations is still pending in a lower federal court.
Both a representative for Live Nation and an attorney for the plaintiffs did not immediately return a request for comment on the Ninth Circuit’s ruling.
Allegra Willis Knerr was promoted to executive vp of global synch licensing at BMG, where she will manage the company’s synch licensing teams across the globe. The Los Angeles-based executive was previously senior vp of global synch licensing, a role she was elevated to last year. She’ll continue reporting to BMG chief content officer Dominique Casimir.
Willis Knerr can be reached at Allegra.Willis.knerr@bmg.com.
Dan Wall joined Live Nation Entertainment as executive vp of corporate and regulatory affairs. Wall has been a key advisor to the company for more than 12 years, previously offering guidance as lead outside counsel as a partner at law firm Latham & Watkins.
Kok-Siew Yeo was named managing director of Warner Music Taiwan. He will oversee Warner Music’s operation in Taiwan and work to strengthen the company’s position as an important player in the global Mandopop industry. Kok-Siew joins the company from Meta, where he served as creator partnerships lead. Based in Taipei, Kok-Siew will report to Warner Music Asia co-presidents Chris Gobalakrishna and Jonathan Serbin.
Vinit Thakkar was named managing director at Sony Music Entertainment in India. He joins the company from Universal Music India, where he served as COO of India and South Asia. (Via afaqs!)
Lou Al-Chamaa was named senior vp/head of A&R publishing at Avex USA. He arrives at the company following six years at Sony Music Publishing, where he served as vp of A&R.
Jennifer Hills and Sarah Desmond were promoted to co-managing directors of Universal Music UK’s brand partnerships and synch division Globe. Both were previously senior vps. Reporting to Hills and Desmond will be Adam Soffe, who is returning to Globe as vp/head of synch, creative, as well as Neil Mulford, who has been promoted to vp/head of synch, licensing.
Vickie Nauman, founder/CEO of music tech consulting company CrossBorderWorks, joined the advisory board of Barcelona-based Web3 music company KLOOV. The company works on digital collectibles, experiences and NFTs.
Nina Musolino joined Page 1 Management as a manager out of the company’s Nashville office. She will work closely with senior director Danielle Middleton in New York as she signs and manages talent. Musolino reports to Page 1 founder and CEO Ashley Page. She was most recently a publisher and artist manager at Forward Music in Nashville. Musolino can be reached at nina@page1management.com.
Jay Cruze was hired as director of Southeast promotion and marketing at Big Machine Records out of Nashville. Cruze succeeds Jeff Davis, who retired last year. He most recently worked at iHeartMedia, where he helped develop and implement national programming for the company’s country platforms. Cruze can be reached at Jay.Cruze@bmlg.net.
President Biden urged Congress to “crack down on excessive online concert, sporting event, and other entertainment ticket fees” on Wednesday (Feb. 1), according to a statement from the White House. Biden’s call for action came roughly a week after Live Nation Entertainment faced scathing critiques from both Democratic and Republic senators during a Senate Judiciary hearing.
Speaking with his competition council, Biden said that Congress “should lower the huge service fees that companies like Ticketmaster slap onto tickets for concerts or sporting events that can easily add hundreds of bucks to a family’s night out,” according to The New York Times. “It’s a basic question of fairness,” he added.
President Biden’s interest in curbing ticket fees is part of the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which he discussed with his competition council Wednesday. The act takes aim at four types of excessive fees that cumulatively “cost American consumers billions of dollars a year.”
“Many online ticket sellers impose massive service fees at check-out that are not disclosed when consumers are choosing their tickets,” the White House noted in a statement. These fees make attending live events prohibitively expensive in some cases: “A family of four attending a show could end up paying far more than $100 in fees above and beyond the cost of the tickets.”
As a result, “the President is calling on Congress to prohibit excessive fees, require the fees to be disclosed in the ticket price, and mandate disclosure of any ticket holdbacks that diminish available supply.”
In addition to limiting ticket fees, the Junk Fee Prevention Act also aims to eliminate “airline fees for family members to sit with young children,” “exorbitant early termination fees for TV, phone, and internet service” and “surprise resort and destination fees.”
Ticket fees were just one of several topics that came up during the Senate Judiciary hearing last month, which also explored the Taylor Swift ticket sale fiasco, whether Live Nation bullies its competitors and the extent to which the company acts as a monopoly. Joe Berchtold, Live Nation’s president and chief financial officer, told lawmakers that his company wasn’t as powerful as critics were making out and argued that “ticketing has never been more competitive.”
The hearing almost immediately caused ripples in the live music industry. The following day, Ineffable Music Group announced that it would no longer collect 20% of touring artists’ merchandise sales at the 10 venues it owns or operates. “Any action we can take to help to insure a healthy, vibrant concert ecosystem is important,” Ineffable Music Group CEO Thomas Cussins told Billboard at the time.
In December, Barclays Center and BSE Global chief executive Sam Zussman arranged a meeting with officials at SeatGeek and offered the ticketing company an ultimatum: Either terminate the seven-year contract they signed with his predecessor, John Abbamondi, the year before, or else Zussman would publicize SeatGeek’s tech failures as they happened, multiple sources tell Billboard.
SeatGeek quietly complied and the ticketing company’s third NBA contract would come to an end, losing one of New York’s most popular venues. Starting this month, all new concerts at the arena are now ticketed by the team’s previous ticketing provider, Live Nation’s Ticketmaster — the world’s biggest ticketing service — under a deal term that runs for three to five years, according to sources familiar with the situation.
“The Barclays Center team met with our execs to figure out a way to amend the contract which would offer us the ability to continue ticketing the teams, but not third party events,” a SeatGeek spokesperson told Billboard in a statement. “Several months later we offered Barclays the opportunity to simply end the agreement, in consultation with our other clients, on good terms.”
A separate statement from Barclays Center confirmed that BSE Global and SeatGeek’s partnership would “wind down” beginning with the New York Liberty’s 2023 season in May. “SeatGeek provided our fans with a first-class gameday ticketing experience,” the statement reads, “and we’re appreciative of the time and energy they put into our work together.”
“They Just Aren’t Designed for High-Demand Ticket Sales”
A Barclays Center representative would not comment on the reason behind the arena’s dramatic turn face, or why Zussman had been frustrated with SeatGeek’s fulfillment of its contract — most ticketing agreements have clearly defined “service level agreements” governing response expediency and site uptime — but an incident from October 2021 provides insight into the issues SeatGeek may have been struggling to rectify.
Booking agents Jared Arfa and Marsha Vlasic at Artist Group International whose agency represents New York indie rock icons The Strokes, claim SeatGeek mishandled an October 2021 presale that cost the group several hundred thousand dollars. That concert, originally scheduled for Dec. 31, 2021, was postponed to April 2022 due to concerns over the omicron COVID-19 variant and ended up selling 13,548 tickets and grossing $1.57 million. That total was 2,000 tickets and $400,000 less than the band’s 2019 New Year’s Eve show at Barclays Center, which Arfa and Vlasic blame on SeatGeek’s user interface— not The Strokes’ popularity.
“They just aren’t designed for high-demand ticket sales, like concerts,” says Arfa, who describes SeatGeek as “a secondary ticketing company that dabbles in primary ticket sales” and struggled during large sales. “There’s things that we have become accustomed to in the music business that SeatGeek can’t do that as well.”
By contrast, says one prominent Brooklyn concert promoter familiar with both ticketing systems, “Ticketmaster has a ton of marketing power and reach in New York” through its huge email lists, search engine optimization and decades of work in the city. “For better or worse,” the booker adds, “Ticketmaster sells the most tickets in New York hands down.”
This wasn’t a one-time instance, either. Sources tell Billboard that concert promoters S2BN booked and then cancelled a Genesis 2022 tour date for Barclays Center due to issues with SeatGeek. The show, which was to be a surprise fourth New York date of the band’s Last Domino run (Genesis played two nights at Madison Square Garden and one at UBS Arena in Belmont), suffered from technical issues after going on sale and never came close to hitting the promoter’s sales goals.
The SeatGeek Deal Points
SeatGeek officials dispute the claims about problems with their system, telling Billboard in a lengthy statement, “Being the fastest growing tech company and a newer entrant to the primary ticketing space, SeatGeek is unencumbered by legacy technology, historical relationships, and outdated biases, allowing us to invest where the most impact can be felt.”
“In the last twelve months,” SeatGeek’s statement continues, “we’ve bolstered our entertainment team with key hires and have completely revamped our entertainment product offering, including making a number of fan-friendly strides in how we handle onsales, from utilizing state-of-the-art 3D view-from-seat imagery to providing ‘similar seat’ recommendations when multiple customers are vying for the same inventory.” The changes have resulted in “resounding appreciation from both AEG and Live Nation’s teams.”
Abbamondi signed the SeatGeek deal in 2021 with a $10 million signing package, sources say, that included cash, savings on the fees SeatGeek charged and a lucrative sponsorship agreement. The contract was seen as a means of helping reduce owner and Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai’s $50 million to $100 million annual losses operating the team and arena since he bought out majority owner Mikhail Prokhorov in 2019. Just seven months later, however, Tsai agreed to accept Abbamondi’s resignation, despite the executive signing a record number of sponsorship agreements for the Nets that brought in an additional $30 million in annual revenue.
For SeatGeek, one of the largest ticket resale services in North America, the Barclays Center deal marked a major win in the company’s move from secondary ticketing into the primary, direct-to-consumer ticket business. Partnering with venues for primary ticketing services also drives significant traffic to SeatGeek’s secondary marketplace. That’s because ticket buyers don’t generally know if they are buying tickets from the team or from a reseller, since all primary and secondary tickets are listed together without any differentiation. The company’s other clients include the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans and Cleveland Cavaliers, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals, most of Major League Soccer and a growing number of Broadway theaters due to an alliance with Shubert Tickets.
Ticketmaster Regains Control
Ticketmaster has been under scrutiny this week, following a high-profile hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, examining competition in the ticketing industry and the company’s disastrous Nov. 15 ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s record-breaking The Eras tour. SeatGeek chief executive Jack Groetzinger testified during the hearing that Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s 2010 merger should be unwound due to a monopolistic behavior, saying it “it stifles competition completely.” (He was not, however, asked about his company’s own outages selling tickets to five of the concert dates for which the company has exclusive deals — including one reported instance where it charged a woman’s credit 14 times for $9,000 in total.) With Barclays Center’s move back to Ticketmaster, and the opening of the UBS Arena in late 2021, Ticketmaster now tickets all four of New York’s major arenas.
Barclays Center’s switch is likely to be examined by the Department of Justice, which monitors Ticketmaster as part of a 13-year-old consent decree dating back to Live Nation’s 2010 merger with Ticketmaster. One area of inquiry will likely be the drop in the number of concerts brought to Barclays Center in 2022, compared to 2019, the last full year of concerts prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Six months after signing with SeatGeek, Barclays Center saw the number of especial events and concerts at the building drop 13% from 2019 to 2022. The number of Live Nation concerts at the building fell 23% compared while the revenue generated from those Live Nation 2022 shows — $14.6 million — was less than half of the $31 million Live Nation concerts generated at Barclays Center in 2019.
The precipitous drop in Live Nation content, if done to retaliate against the venue for signing with Ticketmaster, could be a serious violation of the consent decree and could be grounds for challenging the merger in court.
Billboard found that other major buildings experienced similar fluctuations, though, including Madison Square Garden, which saw its total show count from 2019 to 2022 drop 11%. Revenue from Live Nation touring shows dropped 20% during that same period, while the number of touring shows brought to the arena was only down 2%. The 02 Arena in London, Scotiabank Arena in Toronto and FTX Arena in Miami each also experienced double-digit event night declines at their venues in 2022 compared to 2019.
The arena shows that Live Nation did bring to Barclays Center were some of the company’s most popular tours, according to Boxscore data, including Kendrick Lamar ($3.7 million gross), My Chemical Romance ($4.4 million gross) and Arcade Fire ($1.3 million gross). Barclays Center was also likely impacted by the opening of the OVG-managed UBS Arena, which booked $50 million in shows in 2022. Often the opening of a new venue can temporarily affect older venues as touring shows line up to be among the first to play the new facility. Barclays Center was able to make up for much of the loss caused by the decrease in Live Nation shows with higher grossing events from other promoters. By doing so, executives were able to minimize the venue’s drop in revenue from 2022 to 2019 to a difference of only $2 million, according to Boxscore data. Among those were Elton John’s March 1-2 concerts that generated $4.9 million in sales and Tame Impala’s March 14-15 shows that generated $1.9 million in sales, both promoted by AEG Presents. As well, Bad Bunny’s March 19-20 dates from Latin promoter Henry Cardenas generated more than $7.9 million in sales.
Looking ahead to 2023, Barclays Center already has three of the year’s biggest shows on the books – Madonna, as well as Blink-182 and Bruce Springsteen. Blink and Springsteen are both Live Nation tours booked at the venue prior to the switch back to Ticketmaster.
Live Nation is not legally responsible for a deadly 2014 shooting backstage at a Young Jeezy concert, a California appeals court says, because such an attack was not the kind of event that the concert giant should have seen coming.
In a ruling issued Tuesday (Jan. 24), the California Court of Appeal refused to revive a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Eric Johnson, Jr., an event promoter who was shot to death during an August 2014 stop at a San Francisco-area venue during Jeezy’s Under the Influence of Music tour.
Johnson’s family claimed that Live Nation had been legally negligent because it didn’t have enough security measures in place to prevent the shooting, but the appeals court ruled that the attack was not “foreseeable” — a key requirement in proving such allegations.
“A violent attack by and between artists and their guests in the backstage area of a performance is not a foreseeable occurrence against which Live Nation should have provided preventative measures of the nature plaintiffs suggest,” Justice Stuart R. Pollak wrote in Tuesday’s opinion.
In its ruling, the appeals court suggested that Live Nation likely had good reason to be worried about incidents involving the crowd, citing reports that fights had broken out at previous events. But the court said those same red flags did not exist for potential violence backstage.
“The reports did not … indicate that any of the artists or their entourages engaged in or posed any danger of violence during the tour,” the judges wrote in the ruling. “The head of security also indicated that in her more than 10 years at the amphitheater, there had not been any violent incidents backstage.”
Attorneys for Johnson’s family did not immediately return requests for comment on Thursday. A representative for Live Nation also did not return a request for comment on the ruling.
The ruling in favor of Live Nation came as the company is facing a similar case over the high-profile stabbing death of Drakeo The Ruler at the Once Upon A Time in L.A. music festival in December 2021. Filed by the late rapper’s family, that case also centers on security measures Live Nation took — or didn’t take — that might have prevented a fatal assault backstage.
Johnson, 38, was shot and killed backstage on Aug. 22, 2014, at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, Calif., a venue leased and operated by Live Nation. According to his family’s lawsuit, Johnson had been at the event to “discuss his business arrangements for Young Jeezy to appear at a concert after-party” in nearby San Jose.
According to press reports at the time, Jeezy (real name Jay Jenkins) was taken into police custody in the wake of the shooting and charged with illegal possession of a weapon. But that charge was later dropped and no additional charges were ever filed against the rapper over the incident.
“Mr. Jenkins should not have been arrested and this case should not have been prosecuted,” Jeezy’s attorney told Billboard at the time. “We are pleased it has been dismissed, although frustrated that it took the police and prosecutors months to do the right thing.”
Court records indicate that no murder charges have ever been filed against anyone over Johnson’s killing.
Earlier versions of the civil lawsuit filed by Johnson’s family directly accused Jeezy of committing the shooting, but those claims were later dropped. They were replaced by allegations similar to those made against Live Nation, claiming the rapper’s allegedly negligent conduct was partly to blame for the attack taking place.
On Tuesday, in addition to rejecting the allegations against Live Nation, the California appeals court also dismissed the claims against Jeezy. The court ruled that the family had waited too long to bring the claims, and were thus barred by the statute of limitations.
Jeezy’s attorney declined to comment on the decision.
Read the full ruling here:
Could Taylor Swift be responsible for breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster?
For anyone watching the three-hour U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, aside from frequent quotes of her lyrics, the connection between the pop star and the politicians’ probe is probably starting to feel tangential. And despite Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold’s efforts to shift blame for Swift’s disastrous (yet record-breaking) ticket sale from Ticketmaster to scalpers and bots, most everyone else involved was focused on the m-word — monopoly.
The senators’ line of thinking is that if the Live Nation-owned platform didn’t have such market dominance (around 80% of large venues in the U.S. have exclusive Ticketmaster deals), greater competition would force the company to innovate and improve its services — potentially avoiding the kinds of issues that spoiled the Swift sale last November. But while disruptions to Swift’s highly anticipated North American Eras tour caused such a commotion that Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) felt compelled to call this hearing, by Tuesday it seemed only Berchtold wanted to explore the immediate problems that brought down the sale.
Instead, the lawmakers see taking on Ticketmaster as a winning political issue and an opportunity to reach constituents who have long complained about the ticketing giant. During the hearing, for example, Klobuchar railed against high ticket prices, saying, “To have a strong capitalist system, you have to have competition.” But would competition in ticketing actually drive down ticket prices when it’s the artists who set the price, as Berchtold said, and not Ticketmaster?
For the senators, it hardly matters. Perception is reality and poor perception could lead to serious issues for Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Whether or not the companies’ dominance is a problem in the market, Ticketmaster is widely so despised that it has clearly become an easy target for rare bipartisan political action propelled by incredible public support.
About an hour into the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) laid out a potential path for Democrats in the Senate, potentially with support from Republicans, to force Live Nation into divesting its holdings in Ticketmaster.
Since merging in 2010, the combined companies have been operating under a consent decree, promising not to leverage Live Nation’s touring content in a way that would punish venues for not signing up for Ticketmaster’s services. A Department of Justice intervention, in which the assistant U.S. attorney for antitrust goes to a federal judge with evidence “of monopolistic and predatory abuses,” Blumenthal said, would be the most obvious path toward an intervention forcing Live Nation to divest Ticketmaster. There’s recent precedent for this, too. In 2019, the DOJ punished Live Nation for the six violations by extending the term of the decree five years and forcing the company to pay the reimbursement of millions in investigatory and litigation costs. The DOJ also appointed an independent monitor and required Live Nation to install an internal antitrust compliance officer. If the DOJ caught Live Nation violating the decree again, the government would have a strong case to take before the government showing that the consent decree wasn’t effective and that the merger would have to be unwound.
Hinting that DOJ anti-trust attorneys appointed by Biden are once conducting another review of the company’s compliance with the consent decree, Blumental warned that any violations found during the current review would be grounds for splitting the company in two.
“If the Department of Justice uncovers violations of the consent decree,” Blumental said, “unwinding the merger ought to be on the table.”
Other senators during the committee threatened to take legislative action if the DOJ didn’t do something about Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s combined strength. Government witness Kathleen Bradish, vp for legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute, however, testified that any legislative remedy — like legislation to enhance and clarify U.S. antitrust laws and a regulatory framework to clean up the mostly unregulated ticketing market — would have to be coupled with strong antitrust enforcement action through existing antitrust law in order to break up the company.
Even if there is the political will to unwind Live Nation and Ticketmaster, that outcome is likely still a long shot. Still, even if the companies survive the DOJ probe and can eventually end the consent decree, it’s difficult to see how they repair their image going forward. To most senators on the panel, the company is an illegal monopoly openly operating in defiance of the world’s most powerful legislative bodies. And to most aggrieved fans, it’s screwing up their ticket buying and gouging them to see their favorite acts.
Live Nation investors were either nonplussed or unmoved by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s political theatrics Tuesday (Jan. 24), probing the causes behind a disastrous ticket presale to Taylor Swift‘s Eras tour last November hosted on the company’s Ticketmaster platform. While Live Nation president and chief financial officer Joe Berchtold was being grilled by lawmakers about Ticketmaster’s technology and market power with a focus on monopolistic behavior, Live Nation’s share price rose as much as 2.3% to $77.71 before closing at $76.67, up 1.4% on the day, on about half of the average daily trading volume.
With that modest gain, Live Nation beat the Dow Jones Industrial Average (+0.3%), S&P 500 (-0.1%), Nasdaq composite (-0.3%) and Russell 2000 (-0.3%). It also outperformed two competitors, MSG Entertainment (+0.6%) and Germany’s CTS Eventim (-1.1%), that weren’t subjected to Congressional questioning.
Congressional oversight was already priced into Live Nation’s share price to a degree, though. Live Nation shares fell 7.8% to $66.21 on Nov. 18, 2022, after Sen. Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, penned a letter to Ticketmaster about her concerns regarding its “system failures, increasing fees and complaints of conduct that violate the consent decree” under which Ticketmaster and Live Nation operate.
The hearing, titled “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” turned Live Nation and Ticketmaster into punching bags for senators who, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal noted, were brought together “in an absolute, unified case.” The legislators’ pointed questions and obvious frustration on behalf of their constituents made it clear Ticketmaster is one of the more loathed companies in the U.S. One witness, Kathleen Bradish, vp for legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute, called Live Nation and Ticketmaster “a very traditional monopoly” with a dominant market position that results in higher fees to consumers and less innovation.
Exactly what will come from the hearing is far less certain. While there may be some appetite amongst the senators to undo the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, or implement some other structural remedies, Sen. Klobuchar said the committee will wait for a Department of Justice report before moving forward.
Some senators proposed non-legislative measures. Sen. Joe Kennedy suggested the person in charge of the ticketing presale should be fired. Sen. Marsha Blackburn called the bot-related service outages “unbelievable” and told Berchtold that the company “ought to be able to get some good advice” for better dealing with these kinds of issues.