Touring
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Day After Day Productions (DADP) founder/CEO Seth Shomes announced the hire of respected music industry veteran Melanie Davis as head of touring, along with promotions for Marc Ertel to head of creative and Erin Patterson to head of marketing at the agency.
Davis brings a wealth of experience to DADP, having previously served as head of marketing for ICM Partners’ concert division (2013-2022). He held similar leadership roles at Azoff Music, Nederlander Concerts, Live Nation and Bill Graham Presents.
“One of the things I’m most proud of in my career is that I’ve had the opportunity to work with some really wonderful and groundbreaking members of the touring industry,” said Davis in a statement. “When I first started talking to Day After Day Productions, I knew right away that this was the best next opportunity for me, and I’m thrilled to join a growing, efficient, and hard-working team as part of one of the hottest new companies in the touring space.”
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Patterson and Ertel’s promotions help solidify DADP’s marketing prowess. Patterson’s expertise within the department will be crucial in overseeing all marketing initiatives while Ertel’s proven talent in cutting-edge web design, development, social media and digital marketing further strengthens DADP’s creative capabilities.
“Melanie’s experience and strategic vision will be invaluable as we continue to elevate the marketing efforts for our artists and live events,” said Shomes. “Additionally, Erin and Marc’s well-deserved promotions recognize their exceptional contributions to our clients and agency and ensure a cohesive and powerful marketing force.”
DADP’s client roster boasts Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Missy Elliott, Ludacris, Flo Rida, Bow Wow, The Queens of R&B featuring Xscape, An Evening of Icons featuring The Commodores, The Pointer Sisters, El DeBarge and The Spinners, Staind, Aaron Lewis, “Hollywood medium” Tyler Henry, 98 Degrees, Rob Thomas’ Sidewalk Angels Foundation, Wayne Newton, Engelbert Humperdinck and more.
Davis, Ertel, and Patterson will be supported by marketing coordinator Justin Scott-Young and DADP’s central services division.
Sorry, kids — Live Nation’s antitrust issues have nothing to do with how hard it is to get Taylor Swift tickets. Those are expensive because there just aren’t enough for everyone who wants to see the show, and the antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation won’t change that — and it might not even change the cost of tickets. What it could do, though, is reshape the way the U.S. concert and ticketing businesses work — as well as how they work together.
The lawsuit, filed by the Department of Justice and more than two dozen states, alleges that Live Nation colluded with the venue management company Oak View Group, threatened potential rivals, locked venues into long-term agreements with Ticketmaster in a way that shuts out competitors, restricted promoters’ access to its venues, and acquired companies to reduce competition. There’s a lot there.
Live Nation, at least according to the lawsuit, operates less like a concert promoter than a live entertainment platform — one that uses its dominance in some sectors to secure or further its dominance in others by making it hard for other companies to separate out its services. The most relevant comparison, at least in legal terms, might be the Microsoft antitrust case. Almost all of the behavior described in the lawsuit takes place outside of public view, but the Department of Justice argues that it reduces competition, and indirectly raises ticket prices for consumers. The first of these seems very likely, at least based on the descriptions of company policy in the lawsuit, but the second is less clear. Based on the thriving secondary market, concert tickets still seem to be underpriced.
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The common complaint about Live Nation is that it controls too many venues, and that Ticketmaster has too large a share of the ticketing business, especially in ways that annoy the hell out of consumers. Those factors may be less important than they seem, though. Most areas only have so many venues, and it’s not entirely clear how much sense it might make to have more than one ticket retailer handle each show. (It’s far easier to argue that companies in the primary market shouldn’t enter the secondary market, and vice versa.) And since a share of Ticketmaster fees end up going to promoters or venues anyway, cutting them could just end up shifting costs to the face-value price of tickets. I hate the extra charges on budget airlines, but eliminating them would just make tickets more expensive.
The more serious issue is how Live Nation uses its market power. Ticketmaster signs long-term contracts with venues in exchange for exclusive ticketing rights, which has been an issue since Pearl Jam took on the practice three decades ago. But the most damning parts of the lawsuit, to which Live Nation will respond before the end of summer, involve issues that haven’t received as much attention. The Department of Justice alleges that Live Nation restricts artists from performing in its venues unless they also use the company as a promoter and presses venues to sign exclusive deals with Ticketmaster. This kind of behavior is an important part of what antitrust law is designed to prevent — wielding the leverage that comes from dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in others. The government would need to prove its case, though — and antitrust cases can be hard to win.
The lawsuit alleges that Live Nation works that way by design. It references a 2019 statement by CEO Michael Rapino that “we have to put the show where we make the most economics,” and that venues that use other ticketing companies could be at a disadvantage. (Under the terms of an antitrust consent decree, Live Nation has a court-appointed monitor tasked with preventing this.) The question is whether Live Nation operates this way, and whether what might be thought of as its platform is intended to do so.
Hence the comparison to Microsoft, which the Department of Justice sued in 1998 for trying to use its dominance in operating systems, and its resulting leverage over PC makers, to control the market for web browsers. (Microsoft lost in district court; that decision was partly overturned by the court of appeals; and the case was eventually settled.) In that case, though, the compatibility issues were intuitive and the harm to consumers was obvious.
For years, antitrust law focused on protecting consumers from higher prices, and it’s not entirely clear that tickets would get cheaper — or that there would be more or better concerts — if Live Nation were constrained or broken up. Some judges and scholars now take a broader view, though, and it’s easier to imagine that more competition would lead to more innovation.
Apart from the legal issues, the lawsuit portrays Live Nation as a minefield of conflict of interest, where the best side of a deal to be on is both of them. Thinking about the company means appreciating the significant synergies among its different businesses while somehow also believing that those different businesses can negotiate fairly with one another. Think of Live Nation’s talent management operation, where agents that represent artists sometimes negotiate deals for concerts against another division of the company. The artists must be satisfied with the service they’re getting, but you also have to wonder if the House always wins.
This is just the opening salvo in what’s likely to be a long conflict — antitrust cases tend to be long and complicated, and this one could have eras, like Swift. By the end of it, though, whichever side wins, Live Nation will either be constrained from having its various divisions work together in a way that disadvantages competitors or it will have to take more care that they don’t — and this can only be a good thing for the rest of the business.
Country Music Hall of Fame member Alan Jackson is returning to the road, with the continuation of his Last Call: One More For the Road tour, which played to sold-out arenas across the country in 2022. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news His upcoming tour dates, which […]
Billboard Boxscore unveiled its midyear 2024 charts earlier today, and in addition to U2’s Sphere shows dominating various rankings, there are brand new venue charts that highlight some of the most iconic concert halls in the world. Historically, Boxscore’s capacity-specific venue charts have gone as far down to rooms that hold 5,000 people or less. In an effort to spotlight more clubs and small theaters, there are now separate charts for venues with capacities of 2,501-5k, and 2,500 or less.
Leading the inaugural 2,501-5k chart is Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. Across the eligibility period of Oct. 1, 2023 – March 31, 2024, its 110 shows earned a combined $34.5 million and sold 434,000 tickets. The theater hosted several national touring companies performing iconic Broadway shows, such as Annie, Beetlejuice and Hamilton. There were also highlights from Janelle Monae, My Morning Jacket, Steve Miller Band and the double-bill of Tina Fey & Amy Poehler.
The Fox Theatre finished second on year-end rankings in 2022 and 2023 and was No. 6 on last year’s midyear tally for venues with a capacity of 5,000 or less. Several other perennial theaters appear, with the Beacon Theatre (New York), Chicago Theatre (Chicago), Resorts World Theatre (Las Vegas) and the Au-Rene Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts (Fort Lauderdale) rounding out the top five.
Among rooms with a capacity of 2,500 or less, Teatro Telcel in Mexico City reigns supreme, with a $14 million take from 248,000 tickets sold. Like the Fox Theatre, the CDMX venue’s gross was plumped up by theatrical productions, specifically Anastasia The Musical. Just beneath, Las Vegas’ Encore Theater at Wynn Resort is No. 2 with $13.2 million. Both venues would have been in the top 10 on the old combined 5k-cap-and-below chart.
What follows is a parade of some of the most iconic clubs and small theaters in the U.S. (Teatro Telcel is the only international venue on the chart). New York and Washington, D.C. are each represented twice. The former appears at Nos. 11 and 13 with Brooklyn Steel and Webster Hall, respectively, both booked and promoted by AEG Presents/The Bowery Presents. The latter is at Nos. 12 and 17 with IMP Presents’ 9:30 Club and Lincoln Theatre.
On the west coast, Seattle doubles up. Again, it’s a two-fer from AEG Presents, with Showbox SODO at No. 7 and its sister venue Showbox rounding out the list at No. 20.
Theaters still dominate the lower-capacity ranking, with the top six spots devoted to seated venues. But starting with Showbox SODO, general-admission clubs proliferate the back-end, with Atlanta’s The Eastern (No. 9) and Montreal’s MTelus (No. 15) rubbing up against San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre (No. 10) and the Philadelphia-area Keswick Theatre (No. 18).
Concert industry experts generally thought 2024 would be a down year — or at least less busy than 2023, when Taylor Swift and Beyoncé catapulted the sector to new heights and challenged the personnel within it to keep pace amid its explosive growth.
But so far, 2024 hasn’t brought much rest for the weary. The touring business is entering the summer fueled by huge concert grosses that are unprecedented for the midyear mark, according to Billboard Boxscore.
At midyear, grosses for the top 10 entries on the Top Tours chart total a collective $1.5 billion, up a staggering 83% from last year’s figure of $814.9 million. That marks the first time the combined gross of the top 10 tours has crossed $1 billion by the halfway point. Last year, only two tours — Elton John and Harry Styles — had generated more than $100 million at midyear. This year, eight of them have.
Leading the chart period, which spanned from Oct. 1, 2023, to March 30, 2024, is U2, which opened the new Sphere venue in Las Vegas with a residency that grossed $231.6 million from 38 shows during that time. (U2’s full 40-date Sphere run grossed $244.5 million, though the first two shows, which took place Sept. 29 and Sept. 30, occurred just before the chart period began.)
On the strength of her fall North American tour along with February and March dates in Oceania, P!nk ranks second on the midyear tally with $196 million grossed from 42 shows. At No. 3, Madonna logged 67 of her Celebration Tour’s 80 dates during the period and grossed $190.6 million for a No. 3 rank (the trek wrapped in early May). Rounding out the chart’s top 10 are three Latin tours (Luis Miguel; RBD; and Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull and Ricky Martin), three pop and rock acts (Coldplay, Depeche Mode and the Eagles) and Travis Scott, the sole hip-hop artist in the ranking’s upper tier, who brought in $96 million from 44 North American arena shows on his Circus Maximus Tour — marking the rapper’s first outing since the deadly 2021 Astroworld festival.
The big revenue gain for the chart period’s top-earning tours, during what is normally the slower half of the year, is further evidence that — driven largely by international growth in Asia, South America and Australia — the concert business has become an increasingly year-round business.
Leading the Top Promoters midyear chart with $2.8 billion grossed is Live Nation, which has long advocated for steady, incremental international growth. Its main competitor, AEG — No. 2 on Top Promoters with $976.8 million grossed — produced Taylor Swift’s ongoing The Eras Tour through its partnership with Messina Touring Group and has also continued to expand its footprint globally. Swift did not report her The Eras Tour data to Billboard during the chart period, when she played 26 shows across South America, Australia and Asia.
SPHERE IS HERE
Individual music venues rarely change the entire touring landscape, but few facilities have captured the public’s imagination quite like Las Vegas’ Sphere. With its ground-breaking interior sound and video display — not to mention its light-up, skyline-dominating exterior — the venue has effectively created a new tier of high-end concert experience.
U2’s No. 1 ranking on Top Tours was driven solely by the 38 U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere shows from Oct. 1, 2023, through the residency’s conclusion on March 2, 2024. Those concerts grossed $231.6 million from 630,000 tickets sold, with U2 averaging a $6.1 million gross per show from an average ticket price of $368. While a few megastars have earned more from Vegas residencies, none have ever earned so much from so few shows.
While those in the industry largely view fans’ willingness to increasingly shell out for premium concert experiences as a net positive, some live executives predict that other parts of the sector — festivals, namely — may begin to feel a competitive pinch.
“It’s already getting difficult for festivals to find headliners,” says Wasserman Music agent Sam Hunt, who represents major acts such as Diplo, Run the Jewels and The xx, noting that artists used to make substantially more money headlining festivals than they did headlining arenas. But new ticket-pricing tools have significantly increased what artists can make playing the latter.
That shift in financial posture for the touring business comes amid increasingly frequent festival cancellations, and those woes have extended to the top of the market: This year, Coachella was slow to sell after its initial on-sale and ended up down about 20% in attendance compared with 2023.
Given the choice between festivals and headlining concerts at arenas and stadiums, fans are increasingly choosing the latter. “There is no more comfortable way to enjoy a show than an arena — especially the newer facilities,” says Mark Shulman, senior vp of programming at UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., just outside of Queens, which opened in late 2021. “The modern arena is a concert palace, with incredible acoustics, comfortable seats and tons of bathrooms, plus all kinds of food and beverage options.”
DOJ LAWSUIT LOOMS
The sector’s momentum may be hindered by the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in late May seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster 14 years after the government approved the merger of the two companies. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia joined the lawsuit, which alleges an illegal monopoly in the live entertainment industry. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement announcing the suit.
For the government to prove that Live Nation is a monopoly, it must demonstrate that the company has a dominant market share. Though Billboard’s midyear report only measures the top line of the concert market — during the slowest two quarters of the year — it does offer context about the mega-promoter’s clout.
Take the Top Promoters chart. Live Nation and AEG rank first and second, respectively, followed at No. 3 by OCESA — the Mexican promotion company Live Nation purchased in December 2021 — with $403 million in sales. Of the $5.4 billion spent globally on concert tickets to events promoted by the top 20 promoters during the midyear period, according to Boxscore, Live Nation and OCESA accounted for $3.2 billion in sales — about 60% of the total.
That tracks closely to the Top Tours chart, where 31 tours — nearly two-thirds of the overall list of 50 — were produced by Live Nation. Of the top 10 tours, only one, Luis Miguel, was produced by another company. (If Swift had reported data for her AEG-produced The Eras Tour, she undoubtedly would have swelled the number of non-Live Nation productions in the top 10 to two. However, Billboard’s analysis is based only on global data that is voluntarily reported to Billboard Boxscore by promoters, venues and artists.)
A large part of the DOJ’s inquiry into Live Nation will revolve around the company’s ownership of Ticketmaster, which it acquired in 2010, along with the platform’s current market share of the concert ticketing business. On that front, Billboard found that 69 of the top 100 venues across Boxscore’s five highest-capacity charts at midyear were Ticketmaster clients.
This story will appear in the June 1, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Nicki Minaj already made history with her Pink Friday 2 World Tour, and she’s only going to raise the bar with another leg coming up.
Minaj announced plans for leg two of North America’s Pink Friday 2 World Tour on Wednesday (May 29), as the Queens rapper plots another roundtrip to Gag City this fall.
The Barbz will have their chance at pre-sale tickets starting on Thursday (May 30) on Ticketmaster with the code “social.” The rest of the tickets hit the general public market on Friday at 9 a.m. local show time.
“PRE-SALE STARTS TMRW & TICKETS AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE THIS PINK FRIDAY,” she wrote on Instagram. “Added Miami, Los Angeles, St. Louis, & so many more to the 2nd North American Leg of the #PinkFriday2 #GAGCITY WORLD TOUR. GAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!”
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Minaj will kick off leg two in Philadelphia on Sept. 4, with shows on deck for NYC’s Madison Square Garden, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Miami and wrapping up with a hometown show on Oct. 11 at Long Island’s UBS Arena, which borders Queens.
The 22-date run will bring the Pink Friday 2 World Tour total to more than 80 shows, as she’s currently trekking across Europe.
The Pink Friday 2 World Tour is a record-breaking run, with Minaj now holding the title of the highest grossing rap tour by a woman. The trek is also in the top 10 for highest grossing rap tours of all-time. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore earlier in May, the Pink Friday 2 World Tour grossed $67 million and sold 439,000 tickets for the North American leg.
It’s been an eventful last week overseas for Nicki Minaj, who wasarrested for allegedly carrying drugs in Amsterdam, which forced her to reschedule her Manchester concert for June.
She also made headlines while paying tribute to the late Princess Diana during her Birmingham, U.K., concert over the weekend, as sheheld a moment of silence for the Princess of Wales, who was killed in a 1997 car accident.
Find all of the dates to leg two of the Pink Friday 2 World Tour below.
Nicki Minaj
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Bad Bunny is no stranger to the top of Boxscore charts. In 2022, he led four monthly rankings and then crowned the year-end list of the highest grossing tours worldwide. Naturally, he also topped that year’s Top Latin Tours tally, before Karol G took over in 2023, staging her own sold-out North American stadium tour. Now, as Billboard recaps the biggest tours of April 2024, Bad Bunny and Karol G team up at Nos. 1 and 2 on Top Tours and Top Boxscores.
According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, Bad Bunny grossed $63 million and sold 210,000 tickets in April, logging his second consecutive month at No. 1. The Most Wanted tour’s three-night run at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center contributed $17.8 million of that total, taking the lead on Top Boxscores. Five of his 14 shows in April marked all-time venue highs, among the 16 venue records he’s set since beginning the tour in February.
Including 14 shows in May, the Most Wanted Tour has grossed $207.8 million and sold 703,000 tickets since kicking off in Salt Lake City. Bad Bunny has three more shows to go at San Juan’s Coliseo de Puerto Rico on June 7-9.
Just beneath, Karol G’s Mañana Será Bonito Tour banked $45.1 million and sold 419,000 tickets from nine shows. It’s No. 2 on the gross-based Top Tours chart, but is the best-selling tour of the month, as the only trek to move more than 300,000 and 400,000 tickets. It’s April highlight was three shows at Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile, which is No. 2 on Top Boxscores with a gross of $15 million from 168,000 tickets sold.
It’s the first time that two Latin artists top both charts in succession. On Bad Bunny’s five previous No. 1s, stadium rock and country supported at No. 2, via Elton John, Def Leppard & Motley Crue, and Zach Bryan. When Los Bukis and RBD were on top, Dead & Company and Coldplay were runners-up, respectively.
Both artists have been major contributors to Latin’s growing prominence on the Boxscore charts in the post-pandemic era. Bad Bunny was the first artist to finish at No. 1 on the year-end Top Tours ranking who primarily performs in any language other than English, after BTS wound up at No. 3 in 2019. Karol G’s nine-figure gross in 2023 assured that Bad Bunny’s success was not a one-off or a fluke.
Before COVID-19 turned venues dark in 2020, no Latin artist had a tour that grossed more than $200 million. Now, there have been five, two of which are Bad Bunny and Karol G’s ongoing highlights atop the April recap. In addition to Most Wanted Tour’s $207.8 million, the Mañana Será Bonito Tour has earned $263.8 million and sold 1.8 million tickets since launching last August.
To add to the current noise, the Luis Miguel Tour 2023-24 (No. 6) is up to $258.5 million, current through May 19. Plus, RBD concluded its reunion tour in December, with a final gross of $227.1 million.
The other $200-million Latin tour is Bad Bunny’s own World’s Hottest Tour, which grossed $314.1 million in 2022. Both current tours by Bad Bunny and Karol G are ongoing, but it’s unlikely that either will break the all-time high mark among Latin artists set by World’s Hottest Tour. While the former has just three shows remaining, the latter will play 18 dates in Europe in June and July.
Karol G has averaged $6 million and 41,800 tickets per show across North and South America. That pace would guarantee her the Latin touring record, but her shows in Europe will be mostly in arenas, which cuts the potential per-show attendance in half, at least. To boot, ticket prices are lower in Europe than the U.S., across genres.
Europe is an uncommon territory for Latin artists to sell out arenas and stadiums, but the final leg of the Mañana Será Bonito Tour, especially its final four shows at Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabeau, will likely push its overall haul very close to, or over the $300 million mark.
In addition to Latin’s dominance, country artists take another three of the top 10 spots on Top Tours. Luke Combs is No. 3 with $35.7 million, Kenny Chesney is No. 7 with $18 million, and last month’s runner-up, Zach Bryan, is No. 10 with $12.3 million. Beyond the top 10, Kane Brown and Tyler Childers follow at Nos. 11-12, with $11.5 million and $11.4 million, respectively.
Madonna (No. 4) and Nicki Minaj (No. 5) solidify a woman-dominated top five, while pacing the month’s tours among pop and rap artists, respectively. The former is No. 3 on Top Boxscores, with a five-night engagement at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes. Rounding out the proper routing of her Celebration Tour, those shows grossed $14.8 million and sold 82,400 tickets on April 20-21, 23-24 and 26.
While New York is often represented atop the Top Venues (15,001+ capacity) chart via Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, Brooklyn’s Barclays Center takes the No. 1 spot for the first time in April, with $26.7 million and 99,200 tickets sold across seven shows. That’s an all-time high monthly rank and gross for the arena, having previously inched past the $20 million mark last July, when it sat at No. 2 behind MSG.
After being announced as a headliner for Portola 2024 in San Francisco this September, Justice on Tuesday (May 28) announced a second leg of its upcoming U.S. tour. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news This run will include the French duo’s first ever headlining show at the […]
On the second night of a two-night stint at Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., on Wednesday (May 22), Pearl Jam brought the energy with a powerful, no-frills rock show that delivered on the hits.
More than 30 years after the band catapulted to stardom with its diamond-selling, grunge-era classic Ten, Eddie Vedder’s voice (oft-imitated, never duplicated) remains a vital instrument, while the rest of the band — including guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron — boast the tight, well-oiled chemistry of a lineup that has, remarkably, remained consistent ever since Cameron joined up in 1998.
Though it brought the firepower in spades, Wednesday night’s show — which marked the latest stop on Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter World Tour that launched in Vancouver, B.C., earlier this month — started on a somber note when Vedder launched into “Long Road,” a track off the band’s 1995 Merkin Ball EP. Leading up to the performance, Vedder paid tribute to his late uncle, John Vedder, noting that Wednesday marked the 10th anniversary of his death. “He kinda shaped me from an early age,” Vedder said from the stage. “I just had to get it out of my system before we played tonight.”
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That was far from the only tribute paid by the band on Wednesday, bringing a melancholy undercurrent to the roughly two-and-a-half-hour set. At one point during the evening, Vedder also paid homage to a host of iconic rock drummers who have died within the last several years. “A couple of years ago, just randomly, some of the greatest of all time, we lost,” said Vedder, who rattled off the names of Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins, The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts and Rush’s Neil Peart before segueing into a performance of Dark Matter‘s title track.
Later in the evening, Vedder also remembered the great Tom Petty by revealing that the red guitar he was holding on stage was one the late rock star had given him years earlier. “The day before we left, [when] we were starting the tour, I went into this back room of mine, and I had space to take one more guitar on the road …This guitar was screaming out, ‘Pick me, pick me,’” said Vedder before launching into a cover of Petty’s hit 1989 single “I Won’t Back Down.”
Though new tracks from Dark Matter were sprinkled liberally throughout the performance — including “Wreckage,” “React, Respond” and show-closer “Setting Sun” — Wednesday night’s set understandably leaned heavily into the first decade of Pearl Jam’s career, when the band was at its commercial peak.
Of those early albums, the muscular Ten received a particularly bright spotlight, with Vedder and company busting out renditions of “Even Flow,” “Black,” “Alive” and fan favorite “Jeremy,” which the band performed off the back of the propulsive Yield standout “Do the Evolution” during an extensive encore. Another highlight on Wednesday included the band’s performance of Vitalogy cut “Nothingman,” which served as a particularly potent showcase of Vedder’s still remarkable voice, which retains its clarity and power to move more than three decades on.
The night’s most rousing moment arrived with the second-to-last song, a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” which boasted special guest appearances from Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith (who Vedder had noted was in the house earlier in the evening); Dark Matter producer Andrew Watt on guitar; and the members of Deep Sea Diver, the Seattle-based indie rock outfit that’s serving as the opening act on the first North American leg of the tour. During the extended performance, the band managed to turn the Forum into a full-on dance party, with Vedder flinging tambourines with abandon into the eager hands of the satiated crowd.
Full setlist:
“Long Road”
“Nothingman”
“Present Tense”
“Go”
“Scared of Fear”
“React, Respond”
“Wreckage”
“Untitled” (tour debut)
“MFC “(tour debut)
“All Those Yesterdays” (tour debut)
“Even Flow”
“Dark Matter”
“Corduroy”
“Won’t Tell”
“Black”
“Waiting for Stevie”
“Comatose”
“Rearviewmirror”
Encore:
“I Won’t Back Down” (Tom Petty cover)
“Dance of the Clairvoyants”
“Do the Evolution”
“Jeremy”
“Alive”
“Smile”
“Rockin in the Free World” (Neil Young cover, with Chad Smith, Andrew Watt and Deep Sea Diver)
“Setting Sun”
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.