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    The Emails at the Heart of the Government’s Ticketmaster Case

    Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, is accused of violating antitrust laws. The Justice Department drew on the concert behemoth’s internal communications in its lawsuit.In its lawsuit accusing Live Nation Entertainment, the concert behemoth that owns Ticketmaster, of being an illegal monopoly, the Justice Department drew on a raft of internal communications that offered a rare behind-the-scenes look at the industry.The Justice Department argued in an extensive complaint filed on Thursday that the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which went through in 2010, had hurt competition, hindered innovation and resulted in higher ticket prices and fees for consumers. It called for the company to be broken up.In response, Live Nation, which is also the world’s largest concert promoter, has said that it is not a monopoly, and denied that it has the unilateral power to raise prices. Contrary to the government’s argument about its great power, Live Nation says it now faces more competition than ever, and that the Justice Department’s suit “won’t reduce ticket prices or service fees.”Detailing its allegations, the government relied on eye-opening emails that it says were written by Live Nation’s chief executive, Michael Rapino, and other high-powered figures in the concert world.Here are a few of those accusations.A potential rival’s Kanye West concertOne episode from 2021 goes to the heart of the Justice Department’s allegations that Live Nation went to extreme lengths to protect its competitive edge.Late that year, the government says, Live Nation “threatened commercial retaliation” against the private equity firm Silver Lake, which had an investment in TEG, an Australian ticketing and promotions company that was involved in a highly anticipated benefit show by Kanye West and Drake at the L.A. Coliseum. Silver Lake had also invested in Oak View Group, a venue management company with close ties to Live Nation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Cure Says Ticketmaster Will Issue Refunds After Fee Complaints

    The band said it wanted to make its North American tour “affordable for all,” but after tickets went on sale this week, fans said that fees had ratcheted up the price.The Cure’s frontman, Robert Smith, said on Thursday that Ticketmaster will provide $5 and $10 refunds to fans who purchased tickets for the band’s North American tour after the band complained to the company about high fees.In recent months, Ticketmaster faced increased criticism from ticket buyers as well as from members of Congress who accused its owner, Live Nation Entertainment, of being a monopoly that hinders competition and harms fans.Mr. Smith said on Twitter that Ticketmaster would provide the refunds. “Ticketmaster have agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high,” he wrote.1 OF 2: AFTER FURTHER CONVERSATION, TICKETMASTER HAVE AGREED WITH US THAT MANY OF THE FEES BEING CHARGED ARE UNDULY HIGH, AND AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL HAVE OFFERED A $10 PER TICKET REFUND TO ALL VERIFIED FAN ACCOUNTS FOR LOWEST TICKET PRICE (‘LTP’) TRANSACTIONS…— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 16, 2023
    Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Smith said that people who had purchased the lowest-priced tickets would automatically receive a $10 refund per ticket and that all other ticket buyers would get a $5 refund. He said that these refunds applied to people who had purchased tickets as a “verified fan,” a Ticketmaster system that requires people to register to gain early access to ticket sales.Fans who buy tickets during the general sale on Friday will “incur lower fees,” he said.This week on Twitter, Mr. Smith addressed questions and concerns from fans about buying tickets for the 30-show tour, which runs from May to July and includes three performances at Madison Square Garden in New York in June.The Cure had said in an earlier statement that it wanted tickets “to be affordable for all fans.” As part of this effort, Mr. Smith said that the Cure had refused to participate in Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system, which adjusts ticket prices based on demand.The system was criticized last year after it drove up the cost for Bruce Springsteen tickets, some of which were selling for thousands of dollars.After tickets for the Cure’s tour went on sale on Wednesday, fans shared screenshots that showed tickets priced at $20 with added fees close to or above the $20 base price.Mr. Smith said on Twitter later that day that he was “sickened” by Ticketmaster’s fees.“I have been asking how they are justified,” he wrote in all capital letters, his usual Twitter writing style. “If I get anything coherent by way of an answer I will let you all know.”Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have been under increased scrutiny since November, when the company botched its planned public sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour.In November, the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment focused on whether it had abused its power over the live music industry.In December, 26 of Ms. Swift’s fans filed a lawsuit accusing Live Nation Entertainment of anticompetitive conduct and fraud.In January, the company was the subject of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which senators from both parties criticized the company’s handling of ticket sales for Ms. Swift’s tour as well as its wider business practices.Last month, on the same day Live Nation Entertainment announced it had made $651.3 million in ticket revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, the company responded to politicians in a statement.The company, which sold more than 550 million tickets last year, said it had submitted more than 35 pages of information to policymakers to provide context on the “realities of the industry” that it has dominated since Ticketmaster and Live Nation, an events promoter and venue operator, merged in 2010.“These include the fact that this industry is more competitive than ever: Ticketmaster has actually lost market share since the 2010 merger, not gained it; that venues set and keep most of the fees associated with tickets and are increasingly taking an ever-larger share; and Ticketmaster has for years been advocating for a federal all-in pricing requirement,” the statement said.Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have for decades been criticized for their business practices. The Justice Department said in 2019 that Live Nation Entertainment had “repeatedly violated” the terms of the regulatory agreement that the government imposed as a condition of the merger.The Justice Department investigated complaints of anti-competitive practices by Ticketmaster in the 1990s, after a dispute with the Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam. More

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    Ticketmaster Called a ‘Monopoly’ at Senate Hearing Over Taylor Swift Debacle

    The Judiciary Committee, responding to the bungled sale of Taylor Swift concert tickets, heard the company apologize and its critics trace the problem to the industry’s lack of competition.Live Nation Entertainment, the concert industry giant that owns Ticketmaster, came under withering attack during a Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday, with committee members from both parties criticizing it for the botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour and calling the company a monopoly that hinders competition and harms consumers.Over nearly three hours, senators pilloried a top Live Nation executive, Joe Berchtold, over the handling of Ms. Swift’s tickets last November and over longstanding allegations that the company badgers its competitors to win new business. Such bullying would be a violation of a Justice Department agreement that set conditions on the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010.“This is all the definition of monopoly,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “Live Nation is so powerful that it doesn’t even need to exert pressure. It doesn’t need to threaten. Because people just fall in line.”Some at the hearing went so far as to question whether the two companies, whose agreement with the Justice Department expires in 2025, should be broken up.Mr. Berchtold, Live Nation’s president and chief financial officer, acknowledged the problems with a presale for Ms. Swift’s tour, and apologized to the singer and her fans. When those tickets went on sale, millions of people were turned away. Technical problems also caused tickets to disappear from the online baskets of customers — whom Ticketmaster had approved through its Verified Fan system — as they were trying to buy them.At the hearing, both Republican and Democratic senators expressed concern about Live Nation’s dominance in the ticketing industry. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Berchtold largely attributed Ticketmaster’s failings to an assault from online bots: automated programs, run by scalpers, that seek to snatch up tickets before they ever make their way to consumers. That drew a largely skeptical response from the senators.“This is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said, with more than a hint of anger in her voice. “Why is it,” she added, “that you have not developed an algorithm to sort out what is a bot and what is a consumer?”Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, was even more blunt. “The way your company handled the ticket sales with Ms. Swift,” he said, “was a debacle.”The merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster united the world’s most powerful concert promoter and the biggest ticketing platform, creating a colossus without equal in the multibillion-dollar live music business.In 2019, the last full year unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic for which Live Nation has reported data, the company put on more than 40,000 events around the world and sold 485 million tickets. It owns or otherwise controls more than 300 venues around the world, far more than any other player in the business.In part because of its bulk and global reach, Live Nation has long been the target of complaints from competitors, who contend that the company’s size, and its control of Ticketmaster, give it an unfair advantage.Jerry Mickelson, a longtime independent concert promoter in Chicago, told the senators that a common frustration among the market’s smaller players is that Live Nation can profit from concerts put on by rival promoters because it still makes money through its control of Ticketmaster. “Pepsi doesn’t earn money from Coke,” he said. “But our competitor, Live Nation, makes money from selling tickets to our concerts.”Objections to Live Nation’s business have grown louder since 2019, when the Justice Department said that the company had “repeatedly violated” the terms of its regulatory agreement, called a consent decree.Justice Department investigators said that Live Nation had threatened venues that it would withhold tours under the company’s control if those venues did not sign deals with Ticketmaster, in violation of a key provision in the decree. Live Nation did not admit any wrongdoing, but in early 2020 the Justice Department extended the decree by five years.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, was among those at the hearing who raised the question of whether Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster should be undone.“If the Department of Justice establishes violations of the consent decree,” he said, “then unwinding the merger ought to be on the table.”Mr. Berchtold pushed back against many of the accusations, saying that Live Nation does not threaten venues; that those venues hold a great deal of leverage in negotiating ticketing contracts; and that new entrants like SeatGeek, a rival ticketing platform, have kept Ticketmaster on its toes. According to various estimates cited by the senators, Ticketmaster controls the ticketing at 70 to 80 percent of major concert venues in the United States. Mr. Berchtold said Live Nation’s estimate is 50 to 60 percent and he attributed its market share to the quality of its product.A small number of people demonstrated outside the Senate office building during the hearing, some holding signs referencing the Taylor Swift ticket debacle. Kenny Holston/The New York Times“We believe ticketing has never been more competitive,” he said.At the hearing, called “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” witnesses included other players in the concert business who described great difficulties competing against Live Nation.Jack Groetzinger, the chief executive of SeatGeek, said that venues are afraid of losing Live Nation concert tours if they do not sign with Ticketmaster. He said that is an obstacle for smaller companies like his in winning new business — though SeatGeek has been one of the more successful upstarts in ticketing in recent years, signing major clients like the Dallas Cowboys and Jujamcyn Theaters, one of the major Broadway theater owners.The panel also included a musician, Clyde Lawrence, of a small New York band called Lawrence. Dressed in a black suit, and with a scruffy head of hair, he joked that he could only dream of the crushing ticket demand enjoyed by Ms. Swift. But he described frustrations in dealing with Live Nation, such as the backstage costs it charges musicians, and the opacity of ticket surcharges, for which his band gets nothing.He described a typical show, where the face value of the ticket was $30, plus $12 in fees. Yet out of that $42 paid by the consumer, $30 was eaten up by the venue, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and another $6 went to the band’s touring expenses. “So that leaves us with $6 for an eight-piece band, pretax,” he said, “and we also have to pay our own health insurance.”In his questioning, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, honed in on a facet of Ticketmaster’s business, the resale marketplace that exists seamlessly within its online ticket sales platform, “where you’re forcing everyone in the resale market to come into your ecosystem.”“This is how monopolies work,” Mr. Hawley added. “You leverage market power in one market to get market power in another market — and it looks like you’re doing that in, frankly, multiple markets.”Ms. Klobuchar, who called the hearing, said in a summation that some of the problems in ticketing, such as fighting bot traffic, could be dealt with through legislation. But she said that the larger question, of whether to take action against Live Nation as a monopoly, was best handled by the Justice Department. The near-unanimous criticism from lawmakers on Tuesday may put pressure on the Justice Department to act.The most remarkable aspect of the hearing may have been the display of consensus by a panel often split along partisan lines. Mr. Blumenthal summed that up with a mocking salute to Mr. Berchtold.“I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement,” he said. “You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.” More

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    Taylor Swift Fans Closely Watch Ticketmaster Senate Hearing

    Ticketmaster expected to be grilled by senators during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on anticompetitive behavior in the ticketing industry. But also watching closely, and bringing their own heat, were Taylor Swift’s fans.“I think Swifties have figured something out,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, noted in his opening comments for Tuesday’s hearing, which was prompted by the fiasco surrounding Ticketmaster’s sales for Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour. “They’re very good at getting their message across.”Plans for fans to protest Ticketmaster outside the hearing — at least one of which was made by Jennifer Kinder, a lawyer representing fans in a lawsuit against Ticketmaster’s parent company — resulted in a small turnout on Capitol Hill.One of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit, Jenn Landry, said she took at last-minute flight from her home in Houston, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to attend the hearing, and that it had taken her husband eight hours to successfully buy tickets for the Eras tour.“I didn’t think it was right. It felt like the game was rigged,” Ms. Landry said. Her sign modified a lyric from Swift’s song “All Too Well” to reference the ticket debacle: “We remember your incompetence all too well.”Plenty more fans appeared to be streaming the hearing online, and a link to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s livestream of the proceedings was widely shared by fan social media accounts on Tuesday morning.“I’m having the time of my life right now, watching this courtroom stream,” said Erin Knox, a 21-year-old fan from New York State who, like many others, tweeted live reactions to the proceedings. “I have waited my entire fangirl-hood to see Ticketmaster get called out.”The fervor wasn’t exclusive to music fans. “As a Swiftie and antitrust policy nerd, this hearing is my Olympics,” Shira Stein, a Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, noted on Twitter.And several senators — or their staff members — appeared to have prepared Swift references for the fans they knew would be watching, including Senator Amy Klobuchar and the judiciary committee itself. It tweeted a Swift song title ahead of the hearing, asking: “…Ready for it?” More

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    Taylor Swift Fans Sue Ticketmaster’s Parent Company

    In a lawsuit filed on Friday in a California court, a group of 26 fans said Ticketmaster had engaged in anticompetitive conduct.A group of 26 fans of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing Ticketmaster’s parent company of anticompetitive conduct and fraud several weeks after a chaotic, glitch-filled sale of tickets for Ms. Swift’s upcoming tour left thousands of eager fans empty-handed and unhappy.The 33-page complaint, filed in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, came after Ticketmaster canceled the public sale of tickets last month for Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour, 52 shows scheduled to begin in March. The resulting outcry from fans prompted calls from lawmakers to break up the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.The complaint accuses Ticketmaster of anticompetitive conduct, saying the company has long perpetuated a “scheme” by forcing fans to exclusively use it for presale and sale prices, which are higher than what a competitive market price would be.Ticketmaster also “forced attendees to exclusively use” the platform that it operates for the resale of tickets, called the Secondary Ticket Exchange, to obtain fees and profits above what it could earn in a competitive market, the complaint states. That “anticompetitive behavior,” according to the lawsuit, harms fans and the ticket market.Fans who tried to buy tickets during a presale in mid-November reported waiting in queues for hours or being locked out of online sales. They had to preregister on Ticketmaster and be designated Verified Fans, but, for many, that didn’t help. Ticketmaster ultimately canceled its planned public sale of tickets amid the high demand.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicNew LP: “Midnights,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it.Millennial Anti-Hero: On her latest album, Swift probes the realizations and reckonings of many 30-something women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun.Pandemic Records: In 2020, Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music.“Hundreds of thousands of people waited from four to eight hours and never got an opportunity to buy tickets, so they just want the system to change,” said Jennifer Kinder, a lawyer representing the fans.The lawsuit asks the court to stop Ticketmaster from engaging in similar conduct in the future and to fine the company $2,500 for each violation of a state code that governs unfair competition in California, where the parent company, Live Nation, is based.Even before the botched sale of Taylor Swift tickets, Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, had come under scrutiny for its power.Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock“It has to be made fair,” said Ms. Kinder, who added that she and her 11-year-old daughter were Swift fans. “This is not a fair market. This is not supply and demand. This is a manipulated market that benefits Ticketmaster.”In 2010, Ticketmaster, a ticketing giant, merged with Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion company, becoming Live Nation Entertainment. The company, which says it processes 500 million tickets per year in more than 30 countries, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.Greg Maffei, the chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, said in an interview on CNBC last month that the company “could’ve filled 900 stadiums,” and he partly blamed Swift’s popularity for the problems. “The reality is, Taylor Swift hasn’t been on the road for three or four years, and that’s caused a huge issue,” he said.Ticketmaster apologized in November to Swift fans for the problems with its ticket sales for the Eras Tour.It said that more than two million tickets for the tour were sold on Nov. 15, the most for an artist in a single day. Ticketmaster said it had faced a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes” to buy tickets, resulting in 3.5 billion system requests, four times its previous peak.Even before the botched sale of the Swift concert tickets, Live Nation had come under scrutiny for its power and size. The Justice Department has in recent months been investigating its practices and whether the company maintains a monopoly over the multibillion-dollar live music industry, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.Ms. Swift called the situation “excruciating” in a sharply worded statement on Instagram last month that did not name Ticketmaster.Ms. Swift wrote that she was “extremely protective” of her fans and had brought “so many elements” of her career in house in order to improve fan experiences “by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.”“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” Ms. Swift added. “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.” More