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Ticketmaster partnered with Shazam for a deal allowing artists to link to their Ticketmaster-listed events directly in the Shazam app. Through that integration, Shazam users will be able to see where that artist is playing and buy tickets to their show “with just a few clicks” after Shazaming their music, according to a Ticketmaster blog post. The ticketing giant previously announced similar integrations with TikTok and Snapchat.
Fraud detection company Beatdapp Software partnered with Beatport, a digital service that offers high-quality downloads for DJs to use in live sets, in a deal that aims to banish fraudulent activities on Beatport by integrating Beatdapp’s fraud detection technology into the platform. “We launched streaming products under the Beatport and Beatsource brands in 2019, and despite the fact that they have not historically been a target for streaming fraud, suspicious activity has been on the rise in recent months,” said Helen Sartory, chief revenue officer of The Beatport Group, in a statement. “Although our fraud rates still remain half that of the industry average, we rely on accurate streaming data not only to preserve fair compensation to artists and labels, but also for track recommendations and analytics. We are excited to be able to work with Beatdapp to ensure that our data is representative of authentic listener engagement.”
Virgin Music Group announced a “strategic relationship” with Frontier Works, a Japanese animation-related content production company, to release anime music projects. Virgin will provide Frontier Works with access to its music distribution and marketing platform and global team to support Frontier releases worldwide. This includes Virgin’s AI-driven music marketing technology, which filters streaming data “to create dynamic and actionable insights,” as well as “Smart Audience,” an advertising platform that uses “ethical AI” to increase fan engagement and help drive streaming consumption, according to a press release.
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Believe acquired a 25% stake in Global Records, an independent dance music company covering Central and Eastern Europe, and signed a strategic partnership with the label. The acquisition expands Believe and Global Records’ existing relationship, which since 2016 has allowed the latter to ramp up its territorial expansion and catalog development, according to a press release. Global Records’ catalog racked up more than 6 billion streams across all platforms last year alone and has seen more than 20 billion streams to date, the release adds. Global’s roster includes INNA, Minelli, Carla’s Dreams, Antonia and Holy Molly; it has offices in Germany, Romania and the United States.
Artist manager Matt Musacchio‘s Champ Management partnered with Red Light Management in a deal that brings Vincent Mason, Jessie James Decker and Dawson Anderson to the Red Light roster. Kyle Marsh will also join the Red Light team as a day-to-day manager.
ASM Global expanded its reach into Portugal by taking on the operation of two venue spaces located in Lisbon’s LX Factory, which is located inside a converted factory complex in the Alcantara area. ASM Global will additionally manage the venues’ adjacent outdoor bar, terrace and gallery spaces.
Web3 creator platform DRiP acquired limited-edition music platform Vault Music. Both platforms are on the Solana blockchain. Under the deal, all Vault Music drops and users will transition to the DRiP platform. “Vault was our first music partner on DRiP,” said CEO Vibhu Norby in a statement on the acquisition. “They did a phenomenal job harboring musicians from outside of the existing ecosystem, and we’re excited to help them continue that effort.”
ADA Canada signed a global distribution deal with country music label MCM Recordings, which is home to Jess Moskaluke, Charlie Major and The Redhill Valleys.
The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) extended its agreement with the International Copyright Enterprise (ICE) for several more years. According to a press release, the extended deal “will facilitate faster royalty payments to IMRO members for online performances of their works and enhanced usage transparency.” The release claims IMRO’s online revenue saw 30% growth in 2023.
Independent dance music label Armada Music signed a long-term partnership with Amsterdam-based DJ and producer KI/KI and her self-founded label, slash. Armada will work with KI/KI and her team on A&R, label management, distribution and promotion/marketing for upcoming slash releases. The first release under the joint venture is KI/KI’s latest EP, slash 010.
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.
On Friday (May 31), AEG chairman/CEO Jay Marciano became the first major live music executive to voice support for the Department of Justice’s effort to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, foreshadowing the role AEG will likely play as a key witness in the DOJ’s antitrust case against Ticketmaster.
“AEG has long maintained that Ticketmaster has a monopoly in the U.S. ticketing marketplace and uses that monopoly power to subsidize Live Nation’s content businesses,” Marciano wrote in a memo to staff May 30. Beyond its longstanding criticism that Live Nation uses its scale to overpay for talent, AEG doubled down on its attacks on Ticketmaster’s use of exclusive ticketing contracts, with Marciano telling staff that AEG and its attorneys “strongly believe that DOJ’s lawsuit will succeed and ultimately bring sweeping changes” to the live music industry.
The government interviewed dozens of Live Nation’s competitors during its two-year anti-trust investigation, including AEG — executives at AEG have met with DOJ investigators on at least three separate occasions, including a 2023 meeting to discuss the crash of the ticket presale for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, which AEG promoted through its joint venture with Louis Messina.
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That puts Marciano and AEG in a rare position to galvanize public opinion and build support for his call to staff and the larger music community to help “us lay the groundwork now for the future of the industry.”
But AEG’s claims aren’t as compelling as Marciano thinks, according to Live Nation executive vp of corporate and regulatory affairs Dan Wall, who responded to Marciano’s May 30 letter with a statement alleging AEG is trying to use Live Nation’s antitrust case “to advance their own interests.”
“AEG supports this case — indeed, begged DOJ to file it — because it doesn’t want to pay artists market rates or convince venues to adopt its second-rate ticketing system exclusively,” Wall said in a statement provided to Billboard after Marciano’s statement was released.
AEG declined to comment for this story.
The battle between Live Nation and AEG dates back to the federal government’s 2010 approval of Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster, which the government approved by imposing a number of conditions on Ticketmaster designed to increase competition. As part of those conditions, referred to as the consent decree, the DOJ required Ticketmaster to license its source code and technology to AEG to create a competing ticketing service. The government did not address some of Ticketmaster’s more controversial tactics at the time, like the use of exclusive contracts to lock venues into long-term deals, which lies at the heart of this current conflict.
AEG only licensed Ticketmaster’s technology for a year, and in 2011 announced it was instead building a new ticketing platform called AXS with the help of Montreal firm Outbox ticketing. It took two years to switch all of AEG’s venues globally to AXS Tickets, and then AEG struggled to sign on new clients, even after merging with Veritix in 2015, and in 2019 ended up losing a major client — Altitude Sports and Entertainment — to a startup called Rival launched by former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard.
AXS’ struggles were due in part to its ownership structure following the 2015 merger with Veritix, which divided ownership among AEG, private-equity firm TPG and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, who previously owned Veritix. In 2019, AXS’ partners began exploring a sale of the company and looked at buying Rival or being bought by Rival, deals AEG blocked thanks to AXS’ ownership rules that required unanimous consent for all material decisions. AEG also blocked a merger between AXS and CTS Eventim, a powerful European ticketing provider that was looking for an entry point in the U.S. market to compete with Ticketmaster.
Gilbert and TPG eventually agreed to sell their stakes in AXS to AEG in 2019, which by then had started to explore a new business model for the ticketer, built around non-exclusive ticketing contracts. Instead of competing with Ticketmaster to sign venues to AXS, AEG would instead focus on expanding its use of AXS ticketing for AEG-promoted tours. Both Live Nation and AEG prefer to use their own ticketing platforms for the concerts they promote because it allows the promoters to directly control the customer data.
Hoping to encourage Ticketmaster to allow AEG to use AXS whenever it brought tours to buildings ticketed by Ticketmaster, AEG offered to allow Live Nation to use Ticketmaster at the venues AEG controls, including the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
AEG would extract a similar concession from Live Nation in 2021 that would earn a mention in the DOJ’s lawsuit against Ticketmaster. On June 15 of that year, leading venue operations company ASM Global, in which AEG owned a minority stake, announced it had renewed its agreement with Ticketmaster to provide ticketing services for a majority of the 300 venues ASM manages.
The government flagged the agreement as suspicious because AEG at the time owned 30% of ASM and had “advocated for AXS to serve as the exclusive primary ticketer for the ASM Global venues,” the complaint reads. “But ASM Global’s majority shareholder, Onex, worried that Live Nation would retaliate by withholding shows from ASM Global venues if ASM Global entirely switched away from using Ticketmaster.”
A source close to the deal called the DOJ’s version of the story an “oversimplification,” noting that AEG and Onex didn’t have the right to require ASM Global clients to use one ticketing system over the other and that the majority of clients opted to stay with Live Nation. ASM did, however, convince Live Nation to grant a rare exception to its venue contracts, allowing ASM venues contracted to Ticketmaster to switch to AXS tickets for any tours AEG brought to the buildings.
In exchange, Ticketmaster paid a large advance for the multiyear contract and issued a press release, quoting ASM Global president/CEO Ron Bension saying, “Aligning with industry leaders like Ticketmaster is a critical component in providing millions of people with the most seamless and secure live experiences.”
Happy to have secured the largest carve-out in Ticketmaster’s exclusivity contract to date, AXS decided to push for more exceptions. In 2022, AEG began routing Swift’s The Eras Tour alongside its partner, Messina Touring Group. The majority of the venues on the tour were Ticketmaster-exclusive facilities, though ASM managed five of the stadiums, representing 12 shows on the 52-date trek. But two of those dates — a pair of concerts at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. — would be ticketed by SeatGeek under its exclusive deal with the Arizona Cardinals. Making matters worse, two of ASM’s management clients decided to partner with Ticketmaster for the sale.
Down to just five shows at two stadiums, AEG dropped the matter, but not before reporting the issue to the DOJ, encouraging them to look at Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s use of exclusive contracts as anti-competitive.
After the fiasco, Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei appeared on CNBC to defend Ticketmaster and claim “AEG, who is the promoter for Taylor Swift, chose to use us because, in reality, we are the largest and most effective ticket seller in the world,” he said. “Even our competitors want to come on our platform.” AEG leadership was quick to respond. “Ticketmaster’s exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues on The Eras Tour required us to ticket through their system,” the leadership said in a statement, adding, “We didn’t have a choice.”
In the months following, AEG’s relationship with Live Nation only worsened. In January 2023, AEG announced it was backing a U.S. tour for chart-topping singer Zach Bryan who had just released a live album called All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster. The album title succinctly encapsulated decades of anti-Ticketmaster sentiment from music fans over Ticketmaster fees, pricing and indignities and AEG was eager to get in early. With AEG as his promoter, Bryan embarked on an expansive tour of non-Ticketmaster buildings, a gambit that hadn’t been attempted since Pearl Jam in the 1990s. AEG even deployed a sophisticated anti-scalping system to keep tickets out of the hands of scalpers.
Despite the tour’s success, Bryan had reached a surprising conclusion about the experience — some of his homies hated AXS tickets too.
“Everyone complained about AXS last year. Using all ticketing sites this year,” he said of his 2023 Quittin’ Time Tour, which was still being promoted by AEG but would no longer route around Ticketmaster buildings and would play all venues, regardless of which company was the ticketer.
“All my homies still do hate Ticketmaster, but hard to realize one guy can’t change the whole system,” Bryan wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “It is intentionally broken and I’ll continue to feel absolutely horrible about the cost of tickets.”
In his written response to Marciano’s letter, Wall, a former litigator for Live Nation who helped architect the 2010 consent decree, says AEG is now trying to use the legal system to compete against Ticketmaster instead of focusing on improving AXS.
Marciano contends that there are many things that the DOJ can do to level the playing field and ended his letter by encouraging his employees not to “get distracted by Live Nation spin” and instead to “prepare for a world with more competition, more innovation, artist and consumer choice, lower ticketing fees, and more music.”
Live music experts are anticipating the antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Live Nation to take years to resolve, given the wide scope of the claims against the concert giant and the various stakeholders in the live music ecosystem.
“It is going to take a couple of years, at least,” Lee Hepner, senior counsel of anti-monopoly group the American Economic Liberties Project, said at the NIVA 2024 conference in New Orleans on Tuesday (June 4). The conference is put on by the National Independent Venue Association, which formed in 2020 to secure federal funding from the government during the pandemic. The upside, for Hepner and other speakers on the panel called Ticket Tyranny: The Unseen Grip of Market Dominance, is the “massive potential in restructuring the industry.”
Ant Taylor, founder and CEO of ticketing competitor Lyte, agreed on Tuesday saying, “Given how big the scope [of the DOJ lawsuit] is, it is going to be challenging to see it through… What excites me about this moment is the opportunity we have as an ecosystem to look — not just at Live Nation — but to look at the way we do business together and the conditions in which Live Nation has thrived.”
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Specifically, Taylor added, “What’s the business model of ticketing and why, for 40 years, has there been so little innovation around it?”
Ticketmaster has been a dominate force in the ticketing business for decades — its 2010 merger with Live Nation only strengthened its position in the U.S. market. The DOJ lawsuit claims that Live Nation-Ticketmaster has “unlawfully maintained monopolies in several concert promotions and primary ticketing markets and engaged in other exclusionary conduct affecting live concert venues, including arenas and amphitheaters.” A major concern for the DOJ and the group of 30 states that jointly filed the suit on May 23 is Live Nation’s “flywheel model,” which the DOJ describes 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.”
Unlike the consent decree that Live Nation has been under since the merger, which was designed to prevent the company from abusing its position, Kevin Erickson, director of Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization Future of Music Coalition, told the audience that he believes the DOJ lawsuit is focusing on the correct parties impacted by the alleged monopoly: the artists, venues and fans.
“Even with the best intentions, a consent decree is inadequate to address the potential for harm,” Erickson said. “It shifts the enforcement burden onto the people who have the least amount of power. It forces artists and artist representatives and venue folks to monitor for violations of antitrust law.”
Hepner explained that Future of Music Coalition has been collecting such complaints against Live Nation for years and encouraged those in the room to reach out on how to connect with the DOJ with additional complaints as the lawsuit works its way through the justice system.
If the DOJ’s lawsuit is successful and Live Nation is forced to divest Ticketmaster, the panelists expressed hope that without the promoter’s financial backing, competition in ticketing will flourish, allow for innovation and end exclusive ticketing contracts often used by Ticketmaster and other major ticketers.
Panelist Gary Witt, president and CEO of Pabst Theater Group, stressed the importance of eliminating Ticketmaster’s dominance due to growing customer dissatisfaction. “It is not about your experience when the customer comes through the door. It is not about the artist’s experience when they come backstage. It’s about the initial experience of buying a ticket,” Witt said to the audience.
The primary ticketing market has become “a closed market and allows for zero innovation,” Witt said, adding, “We have an industry to save here.”
Earlier this week, hackers on a “dark web” site claimed to have stolen data from hundreds of millions of Ticketmaster user accounts — but a source with knowledge of the investigation into the attack says there is no evidence that Ticketmaster fan accounts were compromised or that private user data was stolen.
Officials at Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, acknowledged a breach Friday (May 31) in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, noting it had identified “unauthorized activity within a third-party cloud database environment containing Company data (primarily from its Ticketmaster L.L.C. subsidiary) and launched an investigation with industry-leading forensic investigators to understand what happened.”
The statement noted that the company was “cooperating with law enforcement” and that “as of the date of this filing, the incident has not had, and we do not believe it is reasonably likely to have, a material impact on our overall business operations or on our financial condition or results of operations.”
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According to the source, federal authorities are currently working to understand how a “dark web” site seized by the federal government was recaptured on Monday (May 27) by hackers with the group ShinyHunters and used to ransom 1.3 terabytes of private data allegedly stolen from Ticketmaster for $500,000. Investigators aren’t sure what, if any, Ticketmaster files are being held in the 1.3 terabyte file, the source adds.
The hack, the source tells Billboard, did not involve a breach of the core Ticketmaster system. Rather, company officials are looking at cloud hosting service Snowflake as a possible site of the hack. A hacker claiming to be involved in the attack told the website Bleeping Computer that they had breached Santander Bank and Ticketmaster after hacking into an employee’s account at Snowflake, which provides cloud hosting services for major companies. According to that report, Snowflake is disputing the claim. Billboard independently confirmed that Ticketmaster uses Snowflake’s cloud hosting service.
When reached for comment, Live Nation directed Billboard back to the SEC filing. Snowflake did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Australian ticketing firm Ticketek also reported Friday that it had fallen victim to hackers, notifying customers that the names of some of its users, as well as their dates of birth and email addresses, may have been accessed in a data breach. In a statement on its site, Ticketet said the user information had been stored in a cloud-based platform hosted by a “reputable, global third-party supplier”.
“Ticketek has secure encryption methods in place for all passwords and no Ticketek customer account has been compromised,” company officials said in a statement. “Additionally, Ticketek utilises secure encryption methods for online payments and uses a separate system to process online payments, which has not been impacted. Ticketek does not hold identity documents for its customers.”
A well-known hacking group claims to have breached Ticketmaster and is attempting to sell the personal data of 560 million Ticketmaster users, including their payment details, for $500,000, according to the website Hackread.
Alleged hacking group ShinyHunters has claimed credit for the break-in, resulting in the theft of 1.3 terabytes of stolen data that includes usernames, contact information, order info and partial payment details, like the last four digits of a customer’s credit card, expiration dates and even details designed to prevent fraud (i.e. mother’s maiden name).
Officials with Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, have not responded to requests for comment from Billboard or confirmed that the breach took place, but Australian officials with the country’s Department of Home Affairs told the Australian Broadcasting Company that it was aware of a cyber incident that was part of a data leak expected to impact millions of Ticketmaster customers globally.
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A spokesperson from the Department of Home Affairs told the ABC that the department is “working with Ticketmaster to understand the incident”.
“The data breach, if confirmed, could have severe implications for the affected users, leading to potential identity theft, financial fraud, and further cyber attacks,” the Hackread site explains. “The hacker group’s bold move to put this data on sale goes on to show the growing menace of cybercrime and the increasing sophistication of these cyber adversaries.”
The hack comes as Ticketmaster and Live Nation face attempts by the federal government to break the company up on antitrust grounds. Last week, the Department of Justice’s antitrust division sued Ticketmaster in New York’s Southern District, alleging that the company acted monopolistically. Company officials have vowed to fight the lawsuit.
ShinyHunters emerged on law enforcement’s radar in 2020 and has been linked to breaches affecting more than 60 companies. The group is known to use dark web forums to threaten to leak sensitive consumer information unless the affected companies pay an online ransom. Most breaches are carried out using sophisticated phishing pages that mimic their target’s login portals, tricking employees into entering account credentials and other sensitive data. Members of ShinyHunters then use the stolen credentials to log in to company systems and steal data and customer information.
In January, a U.S. District Court in Seattle sentenced alleged ShinyHunters member Sebastien Raoult to three years in prison and restitution of $5 million after Raoult pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The 22-year-old French national was arrested in Morocco in 2022 and extradited to the United States in January 2023.
ShinyHunters is reportedly selling the Ticketmaster data on Breach Forums, an illegal marketplace that just two weeks ago had been seized by the FBI.
On May 13, FBI officials apprehended the site’s administrator and seized access to login credentials for the entire infrastructure of Breach Forums, including the backend, across its dark web and clear web sites.
“From June 2023 until May 2024, BreachForums was operating as a clearnet marketplace for cybercriminals to buy, sell, and trade contraband, including stolen access devices, means of identification, hacking tools, breached databases, and other illegal services,” FBI official said in a statement at the time.
But several days later, ShinyHunters allegedly contacted the domain registrar of Breach Forums and successfully regained access, according to Hack News, with the FBI seizure notice on the site replaced by a “Site Temporarily Unavailable” message. Earlier today, Breach Forums was updated again, this time with the alleged stolen Ticketmaster data posted on the site for sale.
A Department of Justice lawsuit against Live Nation for violating U.S. antitrust laws is imminent and could be filed as soon as Thursday (May 23), a source with knowledge of the DOJ’s plans tells Billboard.
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The lawsuit is rumored to charge that Live Nation has a monopoly on event ticketing through Ticketmaster and that it illegally uses its monopoly power to grow its business and stifle competition. The DOJ has been investigating Live Nation for more than two years. With that investigation now wrapped, company president Joe Berchtold recently said he was that he was hopeful his company would avoid a legal showdown with the DOJ’s top antitrust lawyer, Jonathan Kanter.
“These are always serious discussions. We wouldn’t get to this point if they didn’t have concerns, but the good news is we’re still talking and they’ve said they have an open mind,” Berchtold told attendees at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications conference in Boston on Tuesday (May 21).
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“Without getting into the real details of the conversation, I think it’s fair to say I continue to believe that we fundamentally have business practices that are fully defensible,” Berchtold added, before continuing: “We’re also open to figuring out common ground in order to get this settled and moved on. But we don’t know exactly what they want at this point still.”
Live Nation declined to comment for this story.
The Department of Justice’s case is believed to be centered around Ticketmaster’s use of exclusive ticketing contracts when signing up venues for its ticketing services. Typically, Ticketmaster pays venues an advance on the revenue that it generates from the fees it charges consumers as part of the ticket-buying process. The longer the contract, the larger the advance Ticketmaster can pay out.
DOJ officials don’t like the practice, arguing that it locks out new companies from competing in the ticketing space. Ticketmaster officials, however, argue that they are open to working with non-exclusive contracts — both the Greek Theatre in Hollywood and Red Rocks in Denver are open facilities where promoters use the ticketing provider of their choice — but that venues often rely on exclusive deals to meet their capital needs.
While Ticketmaster holds more exclusive ticketing contracts than any other company, it isn’t the only one to make use of them: Every major competitor pays upfront advances in exchange for exclusive ticketing agreements with venues and sports teams.
That includes SeatGeek, which reportedly paid $10 million in 2021 for exclusive rights to ticket events at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a seven-year term. Two years into the agreement, Billboard reported at the time, Barclays Center and BSE Global chief executive Sam Zussman threatened to publicize SeatGeek’s tech problems and breaches of contract if it didn’t immediately agree to terminate the deal.
SeatGeek eventually agreed to wind down its relationship with Barclays Center and was replaced by Ticketmaster. DOJ officials reportedly scrutinized the incident during its investigation of Live Nation.
A controversial California Assembly bill that would have forced Ticketmaster to share its ticketing inventory with resale sites StubHub and SeatGeek has been amended with anti-resale provisions that would allow promoters like Live Nation to ban Stubhub and SeatGeek from selling its concert tickets in California.
The whiplash legislative maneuvering is the result of the music industry’s successful effort to thwart Oakland lawmaker Buffy Wicks’ attempt to address long-standing consumer complaints against Ticketmaster, forcing her to significantly water down the legislation.
The original version of the bill was introduced on April 8, when Wicks held a press conference with the California Consumer Federation and members of several state Chamber of Commerce groups and unveiled a plan, endorsed by StubHub and SeatGeek, to “make the ticket market more competitive.” To accomplish this, the bill proposed to outlaw Live Nation’s use of exclusive venue contracts, which Wicks said gave the company an unhealthy 80% share of the concert market and had led to a steep price increase for tickets since the company’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2009.
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Wicks’ bill also included a clause — shocking to many in the live entertainment space — that would have required Ticketmaster to develop software integrations allowing rival ticketing companies and ticket resale sites to pull ticketing inventory from the Ticketmaster site and sell it on their own sites. Wicks said she wanted to create a Kayak.com-style marketplace for tickets, where sites like StubHub and SeatGeek, along with smaller primary ticketing companies like Dice and Tixr, sold the same concert tickets Ticketmaster was selling.
The proposal was immediately opposed by professional sports teams including the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers, along with concert promoters, venue operators, arts groups and a number of live music industry organizations including the National Independent Venues Association, the Recording Academy and the Music Artist Coalition. Critics said the bill stripped California venues of their rights to monetize their ticketing contracts and transferred the power to control how tickets were sold from artists and venues to third-party technology companies without any safeguards.
Wicks explained that the bill would help consumers by making ticketing companies compete to sell tickets, but opponents said sellers would still be incentivized to raise ticket prices for major concerts when demand significantly outpaced supply. Others argued that giving resale sites direct access to primary tickets would push more tickets into the hands of scalpers and cause prices to skyrocket.
Booking agent Sam Hunt with Wasserman Music described the bill as problematic during an April 16 subcommittee hearing, warning that it “punished artists” and “established a dangerous system for fans.”
“Artists agree that the ticketing process is deeply flawed,” said Hunt, before adding that the blame lies with “unregulated ticket brokers” and “the secondary platforms that allow them to exist and flourish.”
Facing universal opposition from the live music industry and several members of the committee, Wicks vowed to make changes to the legislation.
On Tuesday (April 24), during a hearing of the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, Wicks introduced a new, partially completed bill that exempted professional and collegiate sports teams from the new rules. More notably, it included a clause stating that it would be an artist’s decision “to determine the terms and conditions related to the sale, pricing, distribution and transfer of tickets to their events.”
That new language, which mirrors that of legislation in other states as well as proposed federal legislation, was interpreted to mean that artists would be given the right to block resale sites from selling their tickets, potentially ending the resale of concert tickets in California — a sharp contrast with the original bill.
Wicks said the amendment resulted from a compromise with other legislators and was still being revised and amended. Lobbyists for secondary sites like StubHub and SeatGeek testified that they would pull their support for the bill if the new language remained.
Wicks isn’t the only politician tackling ticketing initiatives. Since the high-profile crash of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket sale in November 2022, Ticketmaster has come under fire from members of both parties in Congress and is reportedly the subject of a DOJ investigation on antitrust charges. State lawmakers across the country have largely tried and failed to pass legislation curbing Ticketmaster’s power, but few have swung and missed quite like Wicks, who initially chose to align her efforts with the secondary ticketing market.
Today’s modern live music industry is a diverse cross-section of competing multinational corporations and independent businesses made up of venue operators, talent agencies, concert promoters, artists and their managers, and primary ticketing companies. The broad group of competing interests doesn’t agree on much, except for their universal opposition to the ticket resale business, which many believe caused the Swift ticket sale crash. The bot attack that preceded the temporary disruption of the sale had all the hallmarks of similar attacks utilized by ticket scalping groups.
In its defense, reps for the secondary ticketing business argue that sites like StubHub and SeatGeek provide a safe marketplace to buy and sell tickets that has been embraced by consumers and duplicated by Ticketmaster, which operates its own resale business.
The friction between the music industry and the secondary market involves access to high-demand concerts by artists like Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. Lobbyists for resale sites say Ticketmaster unfairly blocks ticket resellers from accessing high-demand tickets. Ticketmaster officials argue their artist clients want their tickets to be sold directly to fans and not marked up on resale sites.
Following the introduction of Wicks’ revamped bill in California, a new round of debate ensued. During the committee discussion of the legislation, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan said that Wicks’ logic that a Kayak.com site would push ticket prices down was flawed, noting that with hotels, “There’s no secondary market to sell a room for two, three or four” times what was originally paid to book the room.
Assemblymember Lori Wilson added that Wicks should focus her efforts on determining whether Ticketmaster held a competitive or unfair advantage. Committee chair Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said legislators needed to focus on putting consumers first, adding, “We as a committee don’t necessarily think the largest problem is the monopoly at the front end but the brokers in the middle who are buying up the tickets and leading to a lot of the problems” in the marketplace.
Despite these reservations, the new, radically different legislation will move forward. After a brief vote, the rewritten bill passed in the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee and now heads to the Appropriations Committee, where Wicks serves as chair.
A U.S. District Court judge is allowing a shareholder lawsuit against Live Nation to move forward, denying the concert promotion giant’s motion to dismiss it in a decision handed down Friday (Feb. 27).
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The case involves how much the company should have to disclose about ongoing public pressure from federal authorities and how much of its financial success it should attribute to its dominant market share in the concert industry — as opposed to demand for concert tickets or the strength of its business.
Shareholders Brian Donley and Gene Gress are suing Live Nation over drops in its share price from February 2022 to November 2023 that they say were brought on by the company’s “false and misleading statements and omissions” within its annual earnings reports — specifically regarding the company’s alleged “anticompetitive behavior and cooperation with regulators.”
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The lawsuit did not reveal any new antitrust allegations against Live Nation, nor did it detail any new antitrust investigations into the company by regulators. Attorneys for the shareholders instead focused on boilerplate language within the company’s shareholder report and argued that it should have spent more time talking about the threat a federal antitrust investigation posed.
In siding with the shareholders, Judge Kenly Kiya Kato took issue with how the company described its success, noting in a 13-page ruling that she believed that Live Nation’s “failure to include specific facts and details about their presence and control of the live entertainment industry” in its annual report didn’t paint the full picture. Kato wrote in her ruling that the company’s claim that 2022 revenue growth “was a reflection of the quality of the Ticketmaster platform and its continued popularity with clients across the globe” was “misleading” because it failed to mention that “Ticketmaster controls ticket distribution for over 70% of major concert venues,” and “77% of the top 100 amphitheaters worldwide.”
Kato also wrote that Ticketmaster’s claims that its success was based on the superiority of its ticketing systems was in part a false claim because it omitted criticism from competitors who testified against the company in front of the U.S. Senate in early 2023.
Since it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, Live Nation has faced antitrust complaints over the company’s size and market share from competitors, politicians including Senators Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal, and consumer advocates. Scrutiny of the company increased in 2019 when officials with the Department of Justice opted to extend a decade-old consent decree against it, and then ramped up again following the high-profile 2022 crash of Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster sale for her Eras Tour.
Since 2022, Live Nation has not been notified that it’s the subject of any legal action by the Department of Justice and has written in its annual disclosures that it cooperates with all federal and state authorities, operates in a highly competitive marketplace and attributes its revenue growth at the end of 2021 to an increase “in events and higher ticket sales.”
Attorney Laurence M. Rosen, representing several shareholders in the class action lawsuit, said Live Nation’s answers contradict June 2023 reports from Politico and CNBC that the company was “allegedly stonewalling” a Senate subcommittee led by Senator Blumenthal that was seeking documents from the company about how it operated its concerts division.
Live Nation countered that Blumenthal was misrepresenting the dispute, that it had already handed over thousands of documents and was contesting demands for confidential information that included private details about how much artists earned from touring. In its response to the Senate committee, the company argued it would only hand over the documents if confidentiality protections were put in place. While Live Nation’s attorneys viewed the disagreement as insignificant, Rosen argued that the objection meant the company was “not cooperating fully with the ongoing DOJ and Senate Subcommittee investigations,” an attorney for the shareholders wrote.
Live Nation declined to comment for this story.
The concert business has had a record year in 2023 — tours by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were pop culture moments, festivals roared back to life and consumers’ splurging on tickets seemed to defy gravity. There’s likely more good news on the horizon, too. By all forecasts, next year is shaping up for continued success, even as consumers still feel pinched by inflation.
Among the big names to announce stadium tours next year are The Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Green Day and a pairing of Journey and Def Leppard. Chris Stapleton, Zach Bryan and Luke Combs will hit both stadiums and arenas. Drake, Bad Bunny, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Hootie & the Blowfish, New Kids on the Block, Alanis Morissette and The Trilogy Tour featuring Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin and Pitbull will play arenas and amphitheaters. Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour continues in 2024, too, with 85 shows announced for Asia, Australia and North America.
Advanced ticket sales suggest consumers remain eager to see their favorite artists perform live. Through mid-October, Live Nation’s event-related deferred revenue — from ticket sales to events that had not yet occurred — was up 39% year over year, according to the company’s third-quarter earnings release.
AEG Presents, the second-largest promoter, is “feeling really positive” about 2024 tours across all venue sizes and genres, says Rich Schaefer, president of global touring. “I think people are discovering new artists and want to see big shows — and they’re willing to pay for it.” They’re buying well in advance, too: AEG put tickets on sale for 76 Zach Bryan shows in 2024 — some won’t happen until December — and has “largely sold everything out,” says Schaeffer. “That artist especially has a crazy connection with his fans. They’ve seen videos of what his shows are like, and I think everybody wants to experience it.”
Those big tours — and thousands of others — are counting on consumers to continue to open their wallets despite continued high prices for staples and living expenses, rising debt delinquencies and Americans’ credit card debt reaching a record level in the third quarter. The holidays are presenting mixed signals: Black Friday spending was up 2.5% compared to 2022, but numerous surveys have found consumers plan to spend less on gifts this year.
Consumers may feel beleaguered, but they continue to spend to see their favorite artists perform live. “I have weekly booking calls with the over 40 presidents around the world and we talk booking clubs up to stadiums and festivals, and we have not seen anything taper off in any sense,” said Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino during the company’s Nov. 2 earnings call. The company is “not seeing any pullback in any way” in consumer demand regardless of the region or venue size, he added.
A big question, though, is whether consumers will be in a spending mood throughout 2024. A new Goldman Sachs economic outlook report says the U.S. economy today is better than was expected a year ago, inflation will continue to subside and the likelihood of a recession in 2024 is “limited.” The latest data from the University of Michigan is encouraging: U.S. consumer sentiment soared in December and people’s expectations for year-ahead inflation dropped to 3.1% from 4.5% last month.
Whatever uncertainties exist — including falling savings rates and weakening credit conditions — have not materialized in ticket sales thus far. “We certainly see the headlines [about macroeconomic conditions], but it’s not flowing through to numbers that we can see,” Lawrence Fey, CFO of secondary ticket marketplace Vivid Seats, said during a Nov. 7 earnings call.
One could simply look at who’s touring in 2024 to get a sense of where ticket buyers are thinking. “You got The Stones going on the road in parts in North America,” says Doug Arthur of Huber Research Partners. “They’re always a pretty big draw. The Stones are pretty savvy historically about touring when they think the economics support it.”
Consumers’ willingness to spend increasing amounts on live music isn’t a new trend — although some of 2023’s record-setting box office numbers appear to be the result of music fans may be clamoring for live events in after suffering through pandemic-era restrictions. The concert industry has benefited from a lasting shift among consumers from goods to experiences over the last 10 to 15 years, says Brandon Ross, an analyst with LightShed Partners.
This year’s boffo box office numbers weren’t outliers, and Ross expects to see “outsized performance on a global basis” in 2024. “There has been a year-and-a-half long concern for a broader pullback in consumer spending,” says Ross. “I don’t think will not impact growth, but I think there’s substantial tailwind supporting this industry.”
Those tailwinds probably won’t be strong enough for next year’s touring business to duplicate 2023’s stellar growth rate — but no one seems to be expecting that. “I don’t think you’re talking about another up 30% type of year, and I don’t think [Live Nation is] talking about that either,” says Arthur. “But can the concert revenues be up high single digits between volume, fans per show, price per ticket and spending per fan? Yeah, I think that’s not unreasonable at all.”
Artists and promoters will continue to encounter high costs in 2024 — labor, catering, buses and staging are stretched thin with a high number of big tours on the road. That’ll continue to push ticket prices up. Even so, AEG hasn’t seen resistance to higher prices, says Schaefer. “There’s very few instances where we think that pricing is responsible for tickets not selling.”