Live nation
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Consumers are strained by everything from high food prices to soaring rents and mortgage costs — but aren’t giving up live music.
Two years after the concert industry roared back to life in the wake of the COVID pandemic, Live Nation had another recording-setting second quarter. Revenue grew 7% to more than $6 billion while adjusted operating income (AOI) climbed 21% to $716 million. North America was particularly strong, as fan attendance climbed 17% and amphitheater attendance rose about 40%.
That followed a record first quarter in which Live Nation had revenue of $3.8 billion, up 21%, and AOI of $367 million. A notable hiccup during the second quarter was an antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in May, although that hasn’t impacted operations and will take years to move through the courts.
During Tuesday’s earnings call, CEO Michael Rapino and president/CFO Joe Berchtold gave analysts and investors their thoughts on recent tour cancellations, expectations for the second half of 2024 and next year, and Live Nation’s long-term growth rate.
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Cancellations are “in line” with historical trends
Some recent high-profile tour cancellations and weaker-than-expected festival sales have some people wondering if the live music business bit off more than it could chew. Coachella ticket sales were slower than usual, as were those of JazzFest, Beach Life, Welcome to Rockville and Governors Ball. Live Nation had two high-profile tour cancellations in recent months: The Black Keys and Jennifer Lopez.
But Live Nation, the world’s largest promoter, isn’t seeing anything out of the ordinary, said Berchtold. Cancellation rates “historically run kind of 4%-5% of shows [and] about a percent and a half of fans,” he said, and this year’s cancellations are “[a]bsolutely in line with historical trends. I think most of the reports that we’ve seen have been efforts to take one or two data points out of a very large number of tours and shows, and we’re just not seeing anything unusual there.”
“Continued growth” in the second half of the 2024 and into 2025
Berchtold said Live Nation expects to see “continued growth” in fan attendance in the second half of the year. Year-to-date ticket sales to 2024 concerts are 118 million, according to Tuesday’s earnings release, higher than 2023. Sales for arenas, amphitheaters, theater and club shows are up double digits.
As for 2025, Live Nation expects more stadium shows than it had two years ago. This year, a slowdown in stadium shows was partly caused by the Paris Olympics causing “most of France to shut down” for a month, said Rapino. Amphitheater shows provide better margins and high per-fan spending, but more stadium shows means a surge in ticket sales in late 2024 from tour on-sales, and higher gross transaction values. “One stadium show is triple the band count and triple the average ticket price of an amphitheater show,” said Berchtold.
Pushing 10% growth over the long term
After surging in 2022 and 2023 from post-pandemic pent-up demand, Live Nation is settling into a steady, long-term growth rate of 9%-10% annually. The necessary trends are in place, said Rapino: the globalization of the market, the supply of artists, consumer demand, the fan experience and favorable economic factors. Just don’t expect the post-pandemic growth to continue. “We never predicted that the industry was going to grow at 30% a year going forward,” said Rapino.
Live Nation continued on its post-pandemic growth trajectory with another record-setting second quarter. Revenue grew 7% to a record $6.02 billion, and adjusted operating income (AOI) improved 21% to $716 million due to a 61% gain in the concerts segment’s AOI, the company announced Tuesday (July 30).
Despite occasional news about canceled tours and festivals, Live Nation’s results suggest fan demand is strong enough to meet the supply of artists on tour. Cancellation rates for North American concerts are tracking lower than they were in 2023, according to the company, and Live Nation hosted 39 million fans globally in the quarter, up 5% from the prior-year quarter. As tours shifted from stadiums to smaller venues, the total number of concerts increased 23.2% in North America and rose 19.9% overall.
Through the first six months of 2024, total revenue grew 12% to $9.8 billion and AOI improved 19% to $1.08 billion. The number of events grew 16.9% to 25,881, while the number of fans at Live Nation concerts and festivals rose 10.4% to 61.8 million.
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“We continue to see strong demand globally, with a growing variety of shows attracting both casual and diehard fans who are buying tickets at all price points, which speaks to the unique experience only live concerts can provide,” CEO Michael Rapino said in a statement.
With fewer stadium shows than the prior year, Live Nation is leaning on arenas and high-margin amphitheaters in 2024. Arena attendance was up by double digits globally, theater and club attendance rose 15% and amphitheater attendance was up about 40%. Amphitheaters in particular are good for Live Nation’s bottom line. Almost a third of Live Nation’s amphitheaters have been updated since 2022 — including with new bar designs and upgraded VIP boxes — and have produced an aggregate return of over 30%, according to the company.
In the ticketing division, revenue was up 3% to $731 million and AOI was flat at $293 million, and the quarter ranked among the company’s top five in terms of transacted and reported ticket sales. Ticketmaster sold 78 million fee-bearing tickets in the quarter, about the same as the prior-year quarter. Fee-bearing gross transaction value was even at $8.4 billion.
Sponsorships and advertising revenue grew 3% to $312 million and AOI rose 10% to $223 million. Live Nation secured a multi-year, multi-festival partnership with Coca-Cola and an extension with video streaming service Hulu to be the official streaming destination for Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits.
The latest numbers show the extent to which Live Nation has grown since the touring business returned from pandemic-era shutdowns in 2020 and 2021. Second-quarter revenue was 36% greater than the $4.43 billion the company saw in the second quarter of 2022, and AOI was 49% above Live Nation’s $480 million of AOI in the same period in 2022. What’s more, the business is considerably larger than it was before the pandemic. Second-quarter revenue and AOI were up 90.8% and 124.4%, respectively, from the same quarter in 2019.
Topline results for Q2:
Total revenue of $6.02 billion, up 7%, driven by an 8% increase in concert revenue.
Adjusted operating income of $716.2 million, up 21%, driven by a 61% increase in concerts AOI.
Total attendance rose 4.9% to 38.9 million.
The number of concerts rose 19.9% to 14,678.
Live Nation’s top two in-house attorneys will not be allowed to access “highly confidential” documents produced by competitors like AEG Presents and SeatGeek in the antitrust lawsuit filed against the touring giant by the Department of Justice, though it will be granted access to less sensitive “confidential” documents under strict conditions limiting how the information is used and shared, according to a protective court order signed Monday (July 29) in the Southern District of New York.
A federal judge overseeing the case agreed to establish the two-tiered system for dealing with non-public documents the DOJ subpoenaed from Live Nation competitors as part of its ongoing investigation. For the last six weeks, DOJ antitrust lead trial counsel Bonny Sweeney has been in talks with Live Nation, which is accused of operating its ticketing and concert promotion businesses as a monopoly, about restricting access for the company’s in-house lawyers — executive vp of corporate and regulatory affairs Dan Wall and senior vp of litigation Kimberly Tobias — to confidential information handed over by competitors. Attorneys for Live Nation have argued that granting Wall and Tobias access to confidential information is vital in helping the company prepare its defense.
“Mr. Wall and Ms. Tobias are litigation counsel in good standing and officers of the court,” Live Nation outside counsel Alfred C. Pfeiffer wrote in a letter to New York federal judge Arun Subramanian. “Both have been bound by numerous protective orders and never been accused of violating those orders. Their access to confidential information in no way puts such information at risk.”
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Government lawyers counter that even if Wall and Tobias “pledge not to use any information they receive other than for this case, they can’t unsee what they have seen,” Subramanian wrote in a July 23 court order trying to resolve the confidentiality access question. Two days after that, attorneys for SeatGeek, AEG and ASM Global filed letters asking Subramanian to prevent Wall and Tobias from viewing any sensitive documents produced by the companies.
The files SeatGeek produced for the government “include documents that a company would never want to fall into the hands of any competitor,” SeatGeek attorney William Kalema wrote to the court.
“SeatGeek hears on at least a weekly basis from venues that are reluctant even to meet with SeatGeek for fear of retaliation from Defendants,” the letter continued. “If the market were to learn that venues’ contracts and other communications with Ticketmaster’s competitors were made available to Defendants’ senior management, SeatGeek’s ability to market its product would be hindered even further.”
Attorneys for AEG said they had produced “hundreds of thousands of documents” for the DOJ, including the company’s “most sensitive and competitively significant materials.” AEG attorney Justin Bernick took particular issue with Wall over past statements Wall has made in the media and on Live Nation’s blog, arguing that Wall has often acted as the company’s spokesperson rather than its lawyer.
After a brief hearing, Subramanian ruled that Wall and Tobias would not be allowed to view documents marked as highly confidential — meaning those involving trade secrets, customer lists, current or future financial and strategic information, private contract terms, personnel files, planning documents, and anything deemed sensitive by the courts — and that those documents can only be viewed by Live Nation’s outside attorneys. Wall and Tobias can, however, view confidential information — defined as previously non-public financial information, material related to ownership of non-public companies, business plans and marketing campaign documents related to product development.
In order to view confidential court files, Wall and Tobias must agree not to participate or advise Live Nation on “competitive decision-making” or litigation against AEG or SeatGeek — except for litigation tied to the DOJ lawsuit — for two years after the final confidential documents are reviewed.
The “highly confidential” and “confidential” designations will be determined by those producing the documents, Subramanian wrote in the earlier July 23 opinion, noting that “if it turns out that vast swaths of the record are improperly designated highly confidential, the Court will step in” and require “a page-by-page review of documents by the producing party on a tight timeframe or appropriate modifications to the protective order.”
Billboard has reached out to Live Nation for comment on this story. The trial for USA v. Live Nation Entertainment is scheduled to begin March 2, 2026.
Chris Brown and several members of his entourage, along with Brown’s 11:11 Tour promoter Live Nation, are facing a lawsuit over an alleged assault that took place following Brown’s concert in Fort Worth, Texas, on Friday night.
Filed Monday (July 22) in Harris County district court by attorneys Tony Buzbee and Caroline Adams, the lawsuit claims that Brown and several accomplices “brutally and severely beat” four men — Larry Parker, Joseph Lewis, Charles Bush and Damarcus Powell — backstage at Dickies Arena in an unprovoked attack following the show.
“The violence included Brown and his entourage surrounding the Plaintiffs, throwing chairs at them, and repeatedly kicking, stomping, and beating them,” the complaint reads. “The unprovoked violence included multiple strikes to the Plaintiffs’ heads and chests, and ultimately involved stomping them while they were down. The brutal, violent assault participated in and directed by Brown, severely injured all Plaintiffs.”
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According to the complaint, the attack occurred after the four men were invited to the backstage VIP area following the show, where they allegedly waited 30 minutes for Brown to arrive. “Having grown tired of waiting,” the complaint reads, the men began making their way to the exit, at which point Bush says he approached Brown to shake his hand and congratulate him on the concert. After exchanging pleasantries, a member of Brown’s crew then allegedly shouted to Brown, “Man, you don’t remember you two were beefing?” The lawsuit claims that Brown then replied, “Oh yeah, we were…I don’t forget sh–” before instructing his entourage to “f—” Bush up.
At that point, the plaintiffs claim that Brown, along with “seven to ten members” of his crew, followed them into a hallway as they were attempting to leave and attacked them. “One of Brown’s entourage, known by the alias Sinko, ran to the left side of the crowd and punched Bush in the chest,” the complaint reads. “Simultaneously, another of Brown’s entourage, stage alias Hood Boss, picked up a chair and threw it at Bush’s head.”
The complaint says that Parker was also badly beaten after Brown allegedly instructed another member of his entourage, Markies Deandre Conway (a.k.a. Yella Beezy), and several others to “f—” him up. After fleeing into a stairwell, the lawsuit claims Parker became trapped by a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, where he was subsequently attacked by Brown and several other men.
“Upon instruction by Brown, Parker was then punched in the face and chest, kicked in the head for over ten minutes, and stomped on by Defendant Brown and his associates,” the complaint alleges. “Brown encouraged his companions to join in the assault simultaneously. Brown and his entourage then continued to beat Plaintiff Parker closed fisted for almost minutes, repeatedly stomping on Defendant Parker’s head, kicking his face and ribs, and causing severe bodily injury.”
Brown and his crew are also accused of punching Powell in the shoulder and punching Lewis in the shoulder and chest.
The complaint claims that all four men required medical treatment and that Parker was hospitalized and “will need to undergo extensive medical treatment for the damages he suffered in the attack, including head injuries.”
In addition to Brown, the lawsuit names three members of his entourage — Conway, Hood Boss (a.k.a. Omololu Omari Akinlolu) and Sinko Ceej — as defendants. As for Live Nation, the complaint alleges that the concert promoter continued working with Brown despite his history of “bad conduct and violent conduct.” According to the lawsuit, the company “shamelessly profits and promotes Brown’s The 11:11 Tour and brought Brown to Texas for financial gain. Live Nation failed to insure that the [participants] of the concert who may be around Brown, and his associates, were safe.”
The plaintiffs are asking for compensatory and punitive damages “in excess [of] $50 million,” along with actual damages for “pecuniary losses, pain and suffering, disfigurement, mental anguish, and past, present, and future medical expenses,” among other relief.
In making its case, the plaintiffs’ attorneys make note of several of the defendants’ criminal histories, alleging that Ceej was a member of “the blood gang” and spent “at least eight years in prison” and that Conway, “a former Crip gang member,” has been arrested multiple times for firearm possession and sexual assault.
The lawsuit additionally recounts Brown’s well-publicized brushes with the law, including the singer’s guilty plea for beating his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009, for which he was sentenced to five years’ probation and community service and forced to undergo domestic violence counseling. Brown has been arrested and/or sued multiple times for various instances of alleged physical and sexual assault, including by multiple women and his former manager, Michael Guirguis. In 2014, Brown pleaded guilty to simple assault for punching a man in the face the previous year.
Representatives for Brown, Live Nation and Conway did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s requests for comment. Representatives for Akinlolu and Ceej could not be located for comment.
At the beginning of 2013, Mike Luba says he dragged Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on a sort of vision quest. He was working with the band on its Gentlemen of the Road Tour and knew that Lovett had grown up in the tennis town of Wimbledon, England. An avid tennis fan and player himself, Luba wanted to sell the band on “playing a gig at the Wimbledon of New York.”
Built in the 1920s, the stadium, which adjoins and is owned by the West Side Tennis Club (WSTC), had been the site of the U.S. Open for six decades and, in the ’60s and ’70s, hosted a series of landmark concerts by The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, to name a few. But those days had long since passed when Luba says Lovett “took two steps into the site, which at that point had trees growing out of compost piles in the bowl and hadn’t been touched in decades. Ben looked at me and said, ‘This is nothing like Wimbledon. It’s a total fucking train wreck. But we can do a proper rock show here.’
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“That was early 2013,” Luba recalls. “They played that August. That’s how fast I did that.”
Almost 11 years after that first concert, Forest Hills Stadium has evolved into the Chateau Marmont of outdoor venues. Luba and his team have restored much of its ’20s vintage vibe and rehabbed a dozen or so funkily decorated speakeasy-style rooms that ring the stadium floor. (One is entered through a port-a-potty; another, a phone booth.)
A self-described “hippie punk-rock dude,” Luba says the stadium, which has a capacity of about 13,000, will stage “30-ish” events this season in a hypercompetitive market for venues. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, The National, The War on Drugs, Khruangbin, Tiësto, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Pitbull are among those that have played or will play this season. And in early June, Hozier sold out four nights — a first in the stadium’s 101-year history.
Box office results have grown accordingly. In 2019, the stadium grossed $6.7 million; in 2023, it took in $22.1 million and finished at No. 17 for the year among venues with capacities between 10,001 and 15,000, according to Billboard Boxscore. Along with that success, however, came an ongoing legal battle with the local homeowners association, the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation (FHGC), over alleged noise levels and unruly crowds.
Luba had much to say about the contretemps during this conversation with Billboard, which took place in the small hut where he works on the stadium grounds. He also discussed his unique employment arrangement. Luba is a partner in Tiebreaker Productions — which holds a long-term lease to the stadium — with his previous full-time employer, AEG, and its subsidiary The Bowery Presents, as well as some overachiever friends from his high school tennis team. Since last July, he is also Live Nation’s executive vp of strategy. (It’s his second turn at the company: He worked with then-chairman Michael Cohl in the early 2000s.) Given the rivalry between the two live-industry giants, his dual roles can be a tightrope walk.
Eleven years later, how has the stadium evolved?
We realized early on that the place itself was inherently magical. So we just leaned into making it feel like when you come here it’s in its 1920s state, but we are using 2024 technology. So much of the credit for that goes to [stadium GM] Jason Brandt and the work that was done. For years, every penny we made got poured back into it. The food and beverage program has totally been elevated. I’m personally most proud of the fact that we now have real bathrooms that are plumbed into the main sewer system of the city. We’re tied into the power grid instead of having to bring in generators. We’ve put in tons of points of sale for bars so there’s no lines. The load-in went from being three days to four hours. You can pull your trucks right up to the stage. It has really reduced the impact on trucks coming in and out of the neighborhood.
“The first time John McEnroe [second from left] came to see a show, he confirmed an urban legend that in 1977, the last year of the U.S. Open here, someone was shot in the shin. I said, ‘That’s crazy.’ He said, ‘There’s something even crazier. I once played tennis with Carlos Santana [left], Vitas Gerulaitis [second from right, who was once a member of the tennis club’s ground crew] and Meat Loaf [right].’ When I showed him this photo, he tried to take it off the wall. I literally had to wrestle it away from him.”
Nina Westervelt
How did you build your season lineup from a few shows to around 30?
The second year we did five. That was right when I started at AEG. I did a walkaround with [chairman/CEO] Jay Marciano — he had previously run the Garden — who told me, “You will never book more than six shows here. The competition is too much.” I said, “Jay, if it was just me, you’re probably right, but my partner Don Sullivan is one of the great promoters of all time. There’s no way we’re not going to be able to book six fucking shows here.” Sure enough, the second year we got five — and the fifth one was a major favor. The first three seasons — 2013, 2014 and 2015 — were all bands that I’d either slept on their couch or they had slept on my couch. I had been their agent or their manager, and Jay and I were cashing in 30 years’ worth of chips. Zero income.
What did you do to turn that around?
It was really word-of-mouth. The bands told other bands. The crews told other crews. And then people who came to shows told other people. Our original ticketing system was Ticketfly, so we had no mailing list. There was no institutional way to market.
When did your battle with the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation begin?
This was the first master-planned neighborhood ever in America, and it happened to include the tennis club and the stadium. The governing body is the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation, with whom we had an incredible relationship for a decade — multiple presidents, multiple boards. It’s an all-volunteer board, and it changes every couple of years. We did everything in consultation with them, we paid them, and at the end of every season, we would sit down and have a postmortem of what was good, what was bad and give them a check.
They had an election, and a new president [Anthony Oprisiu] comes in. It turns out he has a serious grudge against the tennis club. There are all sorts of rumors about what it is. Whatever it is, there’s no rational anything. It doesn’t make any sense. [Editor’s note: A spokesman for the FHGC denies this, saying, “The FHGC board — made up of 15 members — voted unanimously to commence litigation because of the WSTC and Tiebreaker’s unacceptable behavior.”]
So this beef is more about the tennis club than the concerts?
Yeah, but we’re the easy target. The tropes are so prevalent: rock’n’roll, people creating garbage, pissing everywhere, puking everywhere. And it’s just not true. However, to the general public, it all sounds reasonable. This guy and like three to five board members are like the Matt Gaetzes, Marjorie Taylor Greenes — the Freedom Caucus of Forest Hills. They are willing to destroy it for the 600 people who work here on every show and the more than 375,000 people who come here to enjoy the music.
Haven’t you also addressed their complaints about sound levels?
The first year we got here, the conventional wisdom was that in the old days, the sound was blowing up over the top of the stadium. So, we did a full acoustical study, and the engineer was like, look, in the ‘60s you were basically plopping giant speakers on the stages and blasting it. The PAs now are so sophisticated with the line arrays that we can control the direction of it. He said, we can get it so that there’s no sound going over the top, but it will go down the stairwells. If you cover the stairwells, you’ll trap 98% of it. Then, he said, “What step do you want the earmuffs to go on?” I’m like, “Man, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He said, if you tell me step six, when you hit step six going up to the seats, it will feel like earmuffs get put on your head. Then when you get six steps from the top, you’ll feel like they come off.
Sure as shit, it totally works. We built these bass traps over what used to be kind of dodgy and scary stairwells up into the bowl and after the first show people were freaking out because they’d go into the stairwell and it’s like a sensory deprivation thing. So, we put up signs that say, “You’re standing in a bass trap,” and something like, “These walls were designed specifically to keep the music from reaching our neighbors who are right across the street.” Working hand-in-hand with the DEP, we’ve now built the same sort of enclosures over the ground-floor exits. Outside of putting a roof on it, every hole is blocked. We had Primus ripping on Saturday and there was a moment when I was in the concourse, and I was like, shouldn’t they be on?
“Bob Dylan played air guitar to ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ on this racket his first time back at the stadium,” Luba says.
Nina Westervelt
You gave the corporation a check at the end of each season, and they wanted more?
They wanted $100,000 a show instead of the $5,000 we were paying them. If we wanted to book 20 or more shows, it went to $200,000 a show.
How did they arrive at those numbers?
They made some calculation based on gross ticket sales and attendance, with zero knowledge of our costs. Basically, the only way we survive is selling beer. We have no parking. The bands take all the money, and we’re competing with [Madison Square] Garden, Barclays Center, Central Park, Prospect Park, UBS Arena, Jones Beach and on and on. No one is cutting anyone a deal. [Editor’s note: According to the FHGC spokesman, due to its “decadeslong relationship” with the stadium, it did not charge the market price it charges other entities for closing its streets. He adds, “In light of the stadium’s unwillingness to work in partnership with the FHGC, the FHGC is no longer willing to subsidize the operational costs of the stadium.”]
Where do things stand now?
We got an injunction, which remains in place while this is being litigated. Most of the lawsuit is to make us follow the law and pull the proper permits, which we’ve always done and will continue to do. The judge granted their request to have an independent sound monitor here for every show. We had suggested that the [Department of Environmental Protection] be the independent monitor. They’ve dinged us when we’ve been out of code. They’re a city agency. They have no horse in the race. They’ve dinged us when we’ve been out of code. But after the judge granted their request, they realized they would have to pay for the independent monitor — because it was their request — and they freaked out. Then they wrote a letter withdrawing the one thing that they won because when they won it, they went out to the neighborhood saying they had a triumphant, majestic win in court, and the neighbors were like, whoa, we’re paying for it?
What does the tennis club make of this?
This tennis club is the largest member of the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation. They pay more dues than anyone else. They sued the board for breach of candor and breach of their fiduciary duty because essentially the club is going to be funding the lawsuit against itself. [Editor’s note: In a statement, Oprisiu said, “FHGC remains open to a compromise that respects our community and historic norms of behavior at the club. To date, [the WSTC] and Tiebreaker have yet to share a meaningful proposal for our community to consider. Instead, they have recently tripled the number of events and focused on personal attacks on the board with offensive innuendos and gossip. We’re confident in our legal standing as recently supported by the court’s ruling.”]
You actually own a piece of Forest Hills, right?
The entity is called Tiebreaker Productions. Don Sullivan and I, my high school tennis team, and the guys at MTheory, JT Myers and Nat Pastor, put up the original bread. Then, the MTheory guys said, we don’t want to be in the venue business, and they sold their share to AEG. Then, when AEG acquired Bowery Presents, they got that share.
You’re serious about the high school tennis team?
Dead serious. I have these five friends who have stayed friends since kindergarten. We all went to Wheatley High School in Old Westbury, Long Island. Some of us went to college together. At least once a year we try to get together, and it happened to be the night after I did the walkthrough here. By far, I’m the black sheep of this highly overachieving group. One guy was an incredible high school tennis player. He was considering turning pro but ended up going to Yale and was the best Ivy League tennis player. a freshman. When I explained that I wanted to keep Forest Hills Stadium independent and not sell it to AEG, he looked at me and said, “I love tennis. I love music. Let’s try it.” We were all blotto at that point. I said, “Okay man, tonight go home, take $2 million, put it in a suitcase, go out into your backyard and just torch it. If you can stomach that then welcome to the music business. He called me the next day and said his wife wouldn’t let him do the suitcase thing, but he still wanted to try it.
How did you come to work for Live Nation?
When my deal was potentially coming up at AEG, [Live Nation chief strategy officer] Jordan Zachary called. I was ready to move on. It finally all worked out, and Live Nation gave me this incredible opportunity. I get to work on tours with artists that I love and care about. I get to help them on [business development] when they do new building projects or any kind of venue stuff, and I get to participate a little bit on the big-picture strategy.
Nina Westervelt
How does Forest Hills fit in with your Live Nation work?
From day one, Forest Hills was an open room, like the Garden or the Staples Center. When AEG [took a stake in Tiebreaker], they became the promoter partner, but if there was a band that wanted Live Nation to promote their tour, they would come in. This year, half of the shows we do will be Live Nation and half will be Bowery. When I started back at Live Nation, we began to educate the industry that the idea of playing Jones Beach and Forest Hills is now possible. You look on a map and they’re 27 or so miles apart, but for those who live here, they might as well be Mars and Jupiter. There’s an ecosystem now where Pitbull can play Jones Beach and Forest Hills, as he will, and both will sell out.
How do you balance the Live Nation-AEG equation?
My real job is at Live Nation, and my partners here are Bowery and AEG. The companies clearly don’t like each other, so it’s a little tricky. There’s real-life proprietary shit that I’m dead serious about, and I keep it very, very separate. That’s why I sit out here by myself. I’ll go into the Live Nation office once in a while, but I try to stay out of all the drama. I’m really thankful that both AEG and Live Nation let me exist in this space. And it’s important to me that Live Nation understands that I’m on the Live Nation team. It’s a testament to Rapino and Jordan and that team being open-minded. I mean, I hated Live Nation.
That’s right, you manage The String Cheese Incident, and they sued Ticketmaster for allegedly denying them their direct-to-fan ticket allotment. [The suit was settled.]
Yeah, we sued them under the antitrust act and we probably would have won. But now I see it from the other side that company is full of people who really love music, take real pride in their job, work really hard, and do it at a really high level.
We’ve reported on how Gen Z is not consuming as much alcohol as previous generations. Would you consider selling pot in the way, for instance, that Outside Lands has Grasslands?
I will consider as soon as it’s legal. There’s no reason not to. For me, alcohol is way more dangerous than marijuana. At least in New York State it’s a really gray area. I’m by no means an expert on this, but I think it’s mostly because it’s not federally legal, so there’s no way for the banks — no one knows how to deal with the money part of it. Until there’s some way to actually transact on it, I don’t think we can legally do it anywhere. It’s coming, though, for sure.
What are the most pressing issues facing the live business right now?
Climate change is making it very hard to do outdoor events. I’m worried that at some point they become uninsurable. Every morning, I wake up and multiple shows are canceled in places that have never had [weather issues], like 80-mile-an-hour winds shutting down Lovers & Friends in Las Vegas. And that happens over and over. It’s also become excruciatingly expensive. The supply chain issues are real, labor is real. Five years ago, you could get a bus for $5,000 a week. They’re now $13,000 a week. It’s really hard for bands to tour.
“This is a bobblehead of the master electrician at the stadium, Tommy Sellers. He has been here for basically every show that has been at the stadium, and he’s the spiritual leader for the crew.”
Nina Westervelt
The federal judge presiding over the Department of Justice’s sweeping antitrust case against Live Nation thinks the trial can begin as early as March 2026, according to recent federal court filings.
Judge Arun Subramanian explained Thursday (June 27) in the case’s first pre-trial hearing that he hoped jury selection could begin that month, although he stopped short of setting a firm date.
One of the first items of business for Subramanian, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Joe Biden in 2023, is to rule on a planned motion by Live Nation to move the case from the Southern District of New York to the federal circuit court in Washington, D.C., where Live Nation’s 2010 merger with Ticketmaster was first approved. Subramanian said he believed his court could properly preside over the case but that he would fully consider the advisement.
Prior to being appointed to the federal bench, Subramanian was a partner at litigation firm Susman Godfrey LLP, which currently represents Live Nation in the 2021 Astroworld festival class action lawsuit. Subramanian did not work on that case.
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Government attorneys said in a Tuesday (July 25) filing that they plan to bring additional claims against Live Nation, noting the new claims could include information that attorneys from Live Nation have designated as highly confidential and might ask the courts to seal.
Attorneys for the government “do not believe any of the information at issue merits sealing or overcomes the presumption of public access to judicial documents,” the filings explain, noting that if Live Nation doesn’t budge, the government will ask the judge to rule on the matter.
Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers also complained that Live Nation attorneys have delayed discovery requests and failed to “fully comply with any of the United States’s three pre-complaint civil investigative demands” dating back to October 2022.
“It took Defendants nearly a year to start producing custodial documents,” the filing reads, noting that “their responses to many specifications remain incomplete today.”
Lawyers for Live Nation called the government’s discovery allegation false, noting that “since October 2022, Defendants have spent over 200,000 attorney hours reviewing documents, produced over 600,000 documents from nearly 70 custodians, produced over 33 million observations of data, submitted dozens of written responses, and provided investigative deposition testimony from three high-level executives in response to Plaintiffs’ investigations. In addition, DOJ has access to nearly two million documents that Defendants produced during prior investigations.”
Attorneys for Live Nation added that they want “any documents, data or testimony Plaintiffs received from third parties during their investigation” no later than July 22, 2024.
Live Nation is also challenging the government’s unusual request for a jury trial instead of having the verdict determined by a judge. “If it occurred, it would be the first jury trial ever in a government-brought monopolization case,” the company’s attorneys wrote.
Outside of Live Nation, the government also says it plans to issue more than 100 third-party subpoenas to “ticketers, promoters, ticket brokers, venues, venue management companies, artists, and artists’ agents and managers.”
Live Nation declined to comment for this story.
Live Nation is being represented by longtime attorney and litigator Timothy L. O’Mara and Alfred C. Pfeiffer, both partners at Latham and Watkins. Pfeiffer is the former co-chair of the firm’s Antitrust & Competition Practice. Ticketmaster is represented by David R. Marriott with Cravath, who successfully represented Illumina against the Federal Trade Commission and secured a 2022 victory for the Louis Dreyfus Company against DOJ efforts to block the sale of Imperial Sugar to U.S. Sugar.
The government is represented by Bonny Sweeney, who joined the DOJ in 2022. Sweeney formerly served as a partner at San Francisco firm Hausfeld where she was co-chair of its U.S. antitrust practice group. In 2023, she was named antitrust lawyer of the year by the California Lawyers Association.
Given the glacial pace at which federal antitrust litigation moves, the U.S. Department of Justice’s historic lawsuit against Live Nation and its wholly owned subsidiary Ticketmaster is expected to take years to wind its way through the legal system whether it’s fully adjudicated or the live-event Goliath agrees to make changes to its business, which the government often terms “behavioral remedies.”
And though it’s clearly too early to predict how the case will play out, legal expert and antitrust attorney Lawrence J. White from New York University’s Stern School of Business says the potential winners and losers have already been largely pre-determined based on hints found in the 128-page complaint that the DOJ filed May 23 in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.
“The companies mentioned in the complaint as being the most harmed by anti-competitive behavior are typically the same companies that stand the most to gain in the solution,” White says.
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In the case of Live Nation, the winners will very likely be the company’s main concert promotion rival, AEG Presents; secondary-market ticketing competitor SeatGeek; and a handful of major independent promoters like Chicago’s Jam Productions. The losers would likely be Live Nation; Irving Azoff and Tim Leiweke’s venue owner, management and hospitality company, Oak View Group — which the DOJ alleges “has described itself as a ‘hammer’ and ‘protect[or]’ for Live Nation” — as well as, potentially, major artist management companies and talent agencies, depending on the government’s solution for more competitive ticket pricing.
“The government tends to rely on private companies to carry out its policy goals during the remedy phase of an antitrust case,” explains White, pointing toward the original consent decree drafted around the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. That agreement unsuccessfully propped up two private companies — AEG and Comcast Spectacor — to serve as competitors to Ticketmaster.
Whether the DOJ wins in court or ends up settling with Live Nation, White says it will lean on large corporations to assist with enforcement of the ruling. As Live Nation’s only major competitor for ticketing and concert promotion, AEG, which owns AXS Ticketing, is an obvious choice as a DOJ partner because of the company’s large scale, which will be critical for the DOJ’s long-shot goal to lower ticket prices. (The DOJ is believed to have interviewed more than 100 individuals from the live-music industry as part of its recent antitrust investigation into Live Nation.)
In a May 23 press release that announced the lawsuit filing, Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anti-competitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live-events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters and venue operators.” He contends that increasing competition among Live Nation’s ticketing rivals and in the artist promotion space will lower the face value prices of tickets.
Prior to the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, four or five ticketing companies were capable of competing with the latter at the arena level. In 2024, only two remain: AXS and SeatGeek, the secondary site that also happens to own one of the only primary ticketing products capable of servicing major arenas and stadiums.
In a statement released to Billboard, SeatGeek said, “We are hopeful that the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit to break up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly will restore fair market competition to live entertainment.” On the concert promotion front, there are far fewer major independent promoters now than there were prior to 2010 and only a handful capable of touring major arena acts across the country. In addition to Jam Productions, they include Nashville’s Outback Concerts and Another Planet Entertainment in the San Francisco Bay Area. All three promoters declined to comment for this story.
In a May 31 letter to his staff, AEG chairman/CEO Jay Marciano outlined how the DOJ could make concert promotion fairer and drive down the cost of ticketing by dismantling Live Nation’s “flywheel” business model, which is cited in the DOJ’s complaint and described in its May 23 press release as “a self-reinforcing business model that captures fees and revenue from concert fans and sponsorship, uses that revenue to lock up artists to exclusive promotion deals and then uses its powerful cache of live content to sign venues into long-term exclusive ticketing deals, thereby starting the cycle all over again.”
Marciano’s letter said Live Nation’s flywheel model “deploys the excessive profits of its ticketing monopoly to outspend what the concert market can profitably sustain.”
Under this theory, ticket prices would drop if Live Nation was prevented from using its other revenue sources to overpay artists and compete with other promoters offering artists an 85/15 or a 90/10 split on ticket sales.
Although the theory is not widely accepted by most major talent agents or managers — IAG executive vp/head of global music Jarred Arfa calls it “unrealistic” and “illogical” — it is gaining popularity among large indie promoters and DOJ lawyers, sources tell Billboard. White notes that whether the government settles or takes Ticketmaster to trial will depend on “the time and resources the DOJ wants to expend on the case and the evidence against Live Nation it has collected.”
Two Madonna fans have now dropped their lawsuit complaining about delayed starts to her concerts, but the star’s lawyers are emphatic that the move was “not the result of any settlement” and are warning they might even seek penalties over the “frivolous” case.
In a motion filed in federal court Wednesday (June 19), lawyers for the aggrieved fans said they would permanently drop the case, in which they accused Madonna and Live Nation of breaking laws by making fans wait for hours at December concerts in Brooklyn on her Celebration Tour.
But later that same day, Madonna and Live Nation’s lawyers fired off a letter to the judge advising him that the move to drop the case had been made “unilaterally” by the other side — and that they had not reached any kind of agreement to end a case they say should never have been filed.
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“Defendants believe that this action was a frivolous strike suit designed to force them to incur legal expenses,” the star’s lawyers write. “Plaintiffs have now abandoned this lawsuit when it became clear that this approach would not result in a settlement payment and that they would need to oppose defendants’ motion.”
The motion to drop the case said that each side would “bear its own fees and costs,” but Madonna’s lawyers said in their letter that they had never agreed to that — and that they might still demand that the plaintiffs repay the money they were forced to spend litigating the short-lived lawsuit.
“Given the legal expenses that defendants were forced to incur to defend this action … defendants reserve the right to move for sanctions, attorneys’ fees, and costs,” lawyers for Madonna and Live Nation write.
An attorney for the plaintiffs, Michael Fellows and Jason Alvarez, did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday (June 20).
Madonna and Live Nation were first sued in January over the Brooklyn shows — a case that made headlines because it claimed the fans “had to get up early to go to work” the next day. She was later hit with a similar case in Washington, D.C., that claimed fans had waited in an “uncomfortably hot” arena and that she had lip-synched portions of the show. A third case, filed last month, echoed those claims but also alleged that Madonna’s show in Los Angeles had been unexpectedly “pornographic.”
All three cases have been filed as class actions, seeking to represent potentially thousands of other fans who also endured the alleged delays. By starting the concerts later than expected, the cases claim Madonna and Live Nation breached their contracts with fans and violated state consumer protection laws.
Madonna’s attorneys have strongly rejected those accusations. In a request to dismiss the New York case earlier this year, her lawyers argued that simply needing to wake up early was not the kind of “cognizable injury” that can form the basis for a lawsuit. And they say that anyone buying a concert ticket is well aware that a show likely won’t start at the exact time printed on the ticket.
“No reasonable concertgoer — and certainly no Madonna fan — would expect the headline act at a major arena concert to take the stage at the ticketed event time,” her legal team wrote in April.
While Wednesday’s dismissal means that the New York case is now closed, the D.C. and Los Angeles lawsuits remain pending.
Barclays has suspended its sponsorship of Live Nation’s U.K. festivals following protests from artists over the bank’s links to defense companies supplying arms to Israel as well as fossil fuel firms.
Country singer CMAT, folk group Lankum and rock bands Pest Control, Zulu, Scowl, Speed and Ithaca are among the acts who have either pulled out of or threatened to boycott Live Nation-promoted summer events, including July’s Latitude festival and the three-day Download festival, which starts Friday (June 14) in Donington Park, Leicestershire.
In a statement on Friday, a spokesperson for Live Nation U.K. said, “Following discussion with artists, we have agreed with Barclays that they will step back from sponsorship of our festivals.”
Confirming the news, a spokesperson for Barclays told Billboard that the London-headquartered bank “was asked and has agreed to suspend participation in the remaining Live Nation festivals in 2024.”
“Barclays customers who hold tickets to these festivals are not affected and their tickets remain valid,” the spokesperson continued. “The protestors’ agenda is to have Barclays debank defence companies which is a sector we remain committed to as an essential part of keeping this country and our allies safe.”
Referencing recent outbreaks of vandalism at a number of U.K. Barclays bank branches, where protestors threw paint and smashed windows, the spokesperson said the “only thing that this small group of activists will achieve is to weaken essential support for cultural events enjoyed by millions. It is time that leaders across politics, business, academia and the arts stand united against this.”
Barclays is one of the biggest sponsors of music festivals in the United Kingdom and signed a five-year sponsorship deal with Live Nation last year. Over the past two decades, the company says it has invested £112 million ($142 million) in supporting British music and the country’s arts sector.
Pressure from pro-Palestinian groups on music festivals and arts organizations to cut ties with sponsors with perceived links to Israel has been building since the start of the conflict in Gaza. Last month, more than 150 artists withdrew from Brighton’s Great Escape Festival over the independent event’s ties to Barclays.
Defending its position, Barclays has previously stated that it provides “vital financial services to U.S., U.K. and European public companies that supply defence products to NATO and its allies” but does not directly invest in these companies.
The news that the international bank, which has also drawn heavy criticism from environmental campaigners for bankrolling fossil fuel firms, was pulling out of sponsoring Live Nation’s U.K. festivals was welcomed by campaign group Bands Boycott Barclays.
“As musicians, we were horrified that our music festivals were partnered with Barclays, who are complicit in the genocide in Gaza through investment, loans and underwriting of arms companies supplying the Israeli military,” posted the campaign group on Instagram.
“Hundreds of artists have taken action this summer to make it clear that this is morally reprehensible, and we are glad we have been heard,” the group added.
Posting on X, Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, who is due to play Download this weekend, said that “the fact that the festival has listened to its musicians and cut ties with Barclays Bank is a testament to the power of artists taking collective action for human rights.”
“I’ve been pushing hard for this behind the scenes,” added Morello, “and I salute all the artists like Zulu, Scowl and Speed who have taken a stand to help make this historic withdrawal happen.”
Equity analysts aren’t convinced the U.S. Department of Justice will accomplish its larger goal of separating Live Nation’s concert promotion and ticketing businesses, thereby undoing the controversial merger it allowed in 2010. But if Live Nation and Ticketmaster were to become separate companies, analysts estimate the combined companies would be worth from $85 to $96 per share, based on a handful of reports Billboard has seen.
Live Nation shares were trading around $101 to $102 the day before the lawsuit was announced on May 23. But shares have since traded in the $93 to $94 range, putting the current price at the upper end of analysts’ “sum of the parts” (SOTP) valuations. In the wake of the lawsuit, some analysts have lowered their price targets for Live Nation, and S&P Global downgraded its rating on Live Nation’s debt.
Any good merger creates value greater than the sum of the parts. Live Nation’s business model is a “flywheel” in which one segment (such as concerts) generates value for other segments (ticketing or sponsorship and advertisements). To the company, the flywheel is the result of hard-won competitive advantages built over the past 14 years. To the DOJ, the flywheel represents Live Nation’s ability to use its dominant market position to its advantage in anti-competitive ways.
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Breaking up Live Nation would eliminate the synergies that create value for the combined company. What is currently one stock would become two stocks of two separate companies with different management teams. Live Nation shareholders would likely get ownership in the new, standalone Ticketmaster. Analysts have calculated the value of Live Nation and Ticketmaster using a SOTP approach that combines the value of the business segments as if they were standalone companies.
But analysts have serious doubts the DOJ will succeed in breaking up the company. “Federal Judges…are generally pro-business and we doubt — at least based on [the DOJ’s 128-page] summary — the case is strong enough to either break up Live Nation or for the DOJ to win the lawsuit,” wrote Huber Research analyst Doug Arthur in a Thursday (June 6) note to investors. Similarly, J.P. Morgan sees “a real possibility that [Live Nation] comes out of this a winner” and fends off the DOJ’s ultimate goal of breaking up the company, analysts wrote in a May 29 note to investors.
“The government’s burden is going to be pretty high,” Bill Morrison, partner at Haynes & Boone, tells Billboard. “It’s long been the case in antitrust jurisprudence that it’s not illegal to have a monopoly. What’s illegal is to use that monopoly power in an anti-competitive way. And so that would be the burden that the DOJ would have to prove, which is to show that Live Nation abused its monopoly power and it acted unreasonably to restrain trade to maintain its monopoly.”
There could be outcomes other than a forced divestiture, however. Wolfe Research analysts note the “DOJ does not lose if it reached for the stars and landed on the moon,” they wrote in a May 23 note. “From that perspective, it is entirely possible the DOJ wants to get Live Nation/Ticketmaster to agree to remedies, such as eliminating exclusive ticketing deals, and is using the threat of a breakup to achieve those goals.”
The very existence of the DOJ’s lawsuit has changed how investors will approach Live Nation. The health of the concert business and Live Nation’s strengths will be overshadowed by the pall cast by the DOJ. Northcoast Research downgraded Live Nation from “buy” to “neutral” because analysts believe the stock price will be based on legal news and the political environment rather than fundamentals and business performance. J.P. Morgan also noted a “sentiment overhang” related to the DOJ’s lawsuit and lowered its price target to $116 from $126, although it kept its recommendation at “overweight.”
One variable that has largely gone unmentioned is the possible change in the administration at the White House. President Biden has taken an aggressive stance on protecting competition — the DOJ sank proposed mergers by Spirit-JetBlue and Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster — reducing the fees consumers face everywhere from airlines to concert tickets, and criminally prosecuting companies over no-poaching rules and wage-fixing. A second Trump administration would bring an entirely new slate of appointments to head influential antitrust positions. “It depends on who is in those key [regulatory] spots, and then what the priorities are of those offices and the philosophy,” Morrison says. “We’ve seen big pivots in the past.”
Live Nation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story.