After nearly four full days of deliberation, the jury returned a sweeping verdict. Those of us in the courtroom listened intently as it was read: Live Nation and Ticketmaster were found to have run an illegal monopoly in violation of Section 2 of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act and many state unfair competition laws.

“It’s a great day for antitrust law, it’s a great day for consumers, and this case is a tribute to the 34 states and the District of Columbia who carried this case forward,” said Jeffrey Kessler, chief counsel for the plaintiffs, as he exited the courtroom. “It was my great honor to be working together with everyone on this.”

This was what trial lawyers call a “complete victory”: the jury ruled the same way—for the plaintiff states—on all counts, including on monopolization of multiple distinct markets (involving both major concert venues and large amphitheaters) and a tying claim.

But the victory was extra “complete” in that the jury also fully upheld the plaintiffs’ theory of harm. They awarded damages at the maximum amount calculated by Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz: $1.72 for each ticket sold in each state and D.C. If upheld, that figure will total in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Abrantes-Metz’s testimony had been at the center of intense disputes outside the presence of the jury, with the defense accusing her of perjury and other evidentiary misdoings. The judge is still considering a motion related to the reliability of her calculations. The jurors, however—who saw some of the back and forth that cut back on her answers in real time—appeared to find her testimony trustworthy and compelling.

When asked which expert resonated the most, the foreperson, who declined to be identified, said, “They were all very good,” before adding, “I think Dr. Abrantes-Metz was very good in her expertise and how she demonstrated economically the impact on the consumers.”

The jurors took their time to wade through the evidence and “be mindful,” as the foreperson phrased it. Several pieces of evidence proved key for the plaintiffs’ case. “There were a couple emails—the tone, the language they used,” that stood out, the foreperson said. When I asked about the lawn chairs and the now-infamous “robbing them blind” quote, she said those “stuck in the head of everybody as evidence.”

The final outcome now rests on Judge Subramanian, who will determine whether the company faces structural remedies, including a possible breakup. He will also rule on the defense’s motion for judgment as a matter of law, which essentially seeks to dismiss the case due to insufficient evidence. (Such motions are often essentially perfunctory paperwork to preserve appeal rights, but the judge appeared to be taking this one seriously).

Meanwhile, the stock market appears to be taking the risk of real consequences seriously; Live Nation’s stock went down by more than 6%—while its competitors’ went up by 5% (StubHub) and 9% (Vivid Seats).

Dan Wall, an executive vice president and chief legal officer at Live Nation Entertainment, said after the verdict that the company is “disappointed but there’s a lot more game to play,” referring specifically to the defense’s motion for judgment.

That Live Nation and Ticketmaster are being held liable by a group of lay citizens, rather than a judge, is particularly poignant. As Judge Subramanian closed the trial, he told the jury that their devotion to this case, day in and day out, had given him “hope for our democracy and for our country.”

The jurors echoed a similar sentiment. The foreperson said the experience gave them “faith in the system again; as a citizen we can still make a difference.”

As the foreperson spoke to the press, the others waited nearby. Then they walked down the same block they had walked every day for the past several weeks. “Can we take one quick picture on the steps?” one of them asked. They gathered together, smiling, and took a photo—marking the end of a case that has bound them together as the group that found Live Nation liable.

Share

Leave a comment

After nearly six weeks of testimony that featured executives, venue operators, economists, and artists from across the live music world, the fate of Live Nation Entertainment and its wholly owned subsidiary Ticketmaster now rests with a jury, which will decide whether the most powerful company in live entertainment has formed an illegal monopoly.

“I am honored to stand before you on behalf of 34 different states across the country,” Jeffrey Kessler, lead trial counsel for the plaintiff states, said. These states, from Florida to Vermont, “might not agree on a lot of things, but they agree on this.”

That agreement has formed the backbone of the plaintiffs’ case that Live Nation and Ticketmaster dominate three connected markets: primary ticketing at major venues, primary ticketing for concerts at those venues and the control of large amphitheaters.

The plaintiffs have argued that in these major concert venues, Ticketmaster and Live Nation intentionally acted in ways that are anticompetitive—locking up venues with long-term, exclusive contracts and conditioning Live Nation concerts on venues’ use of Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster’s Dominance in Major Concert Venues

There is little dispute about Ticketmaster’s scale in this alleged market. It controls 86 percent of ticketing contracts for concerts at major concert venues and 73 percent of all ticketing contracts across content types at these venues. Its contracts are typically long-term, averaging about five years, and exclusive. Employees are incentivized with bonuses tied to renewals and contract length, and venues are often offered financial inducements for early renewal.

Ticketmaster’s internal incentive structure, shown to jurors, included escalating bonuses tied to longer contract terms, with higher multipliers for extended deals.

The Helper: Oak View Group

Ticketmaster’s control over venues is reinforced through its relationship with Oak View Group, a venue management company that acts as an intermediary in its alleged monopolistic scheme. In 2022, Ticketmaster signed a 10-year agreement with OVG requiring the company to push the over 200 venues it manages toward adopting Ticketmaster as the exclusive provider, even as it remains formally obligated to act in the venues’ best interests. At times OVG did not tell its managed venues about the conflict of interest or its internal analyses that concluded that Ticketmaster’s terms could leave venues financially worse off.

(On midday Friday, after closing arguments, the jury asked to see a transcript of OVG President Chris Granger’s testimony).

Ticketmaster Retaliation and Quality

Kessler also spent time discussing what he described as retaliation against venues that moved away from Ticketmaster. According to plaintiffs’ expert Nicholas Hill, from 2017 through 2024, venues that moved away from Ticketmaster saw Live Nation shows decline from an annual average of 17 concerts in the last year of their contracts to 11 in the year after switching; those that moved to Ticketmaster saw shows rise from 14 to 27.

Nowhere was this claim more pointed than at Barclays. If you’ve been reading, you’ll know that central to the claim about retaliation over leaving Ticketmaster is the Barclays fiasco in which Barclays left Ticketmaster for SeatGeek in 2021, a decision that provoked alleged threats and retaliation from Live Nation, only to return two years later. Hill found that Barclays saw a sharp drop in Live Nation shows when it left Ticketmaster and a rebound when it returned to Ticketmaster the following year.

But, throughout the trial and in its closing argument, Live Nation portrayed Ticketmaster as a high-quality ticketing service. Lead trial counsel David Marriott argued that Ticketmaster’s market position reflects the strength of its product. Over the course of 20 years, Ticketmaster has been building itself into a premier ticketing service, and a number of venue operators have streamed through the courtroom over the past several weeks to testify to this effect.

Even the chief entertainment officer at Barclays testified that during the time of the switch she feared all promoters — not just Live Nation — would bring less content to Barclays because SeatGeek had worse performance than Ticketmaster.

Amphitheaters, Lawn Chairs and “Robbing Them Blind”

Perhaps Live Nation’s Achilles’ heel will be its amphitheaters. Of the 87 large amphitheaters in the U.S., Live Nation owns or exclusively operates 78 percent. Plaintiffs argue that the company uses that control to limit competitors, allowing only Live Nation-promoted artists to perform at those venues.

Kessler returned repeatedly to internal company communications shown at trial, many of which discussed amphitheaters. Jurors heard phrases like “incredible moat around the castle,” “velvet hammer,” “crush the competition,” “we alone can move the market,” and “boil the frog.”

“Who talks like this?” Kessler asked. “The answer, I think you will find, is a monopolist.”

These phrases, several of which were quotes from Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino or other company executives, are damning. Though small anecdotes, these moments visibly struck the jurors when read at trial. Amphitheater managers joked about hiking the prices of parking, which they could do without any fan pullback, referring to it as “robbing them blind, baby.”

Earlier in the trial Marriott argued that these parking costs were extra and only for those who wanted VIP parking. But it was revealed that Live Nation banned outside lawn chairs at its amphitheaters, forcing customers to pay $15 or watch a show without a chair, something that earned Live Nation $7 million in profits across just 15 amphitheaters in a year. Kessler relished lingering on these greedy details.

In his closing, Marriott downplayed such language as corporate bravado: “This is a case now about lawn chairs and parking. That is what they are. That is what they’ve gone to, focusing on lawn chairs and parking,” he said. He asserted that referring to “robbing them blind” in connection with amphitheater parking, while perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, was hardly egregious when amphitheater parking is less than a quarter of what fans pay to park at the world-famous music festival, Coachella, which is ticketed by AXS.

As for phrases like “crushing the competition,” Marriott offered little justification but likened this language to the terminology used among underage rivals at little league games.

Relevant Markets?

Ultimately, whatever the jury makes of Live Nation’s market power or alleged anticompetitive conduct, it must first decide whether the markets defined by the plaintiffs actually exist (primary ticketing for all events, including sports, at major concert venues; primary ticketing for concerts only at major concert venues; and the artist-amphitheater market).

The plaintiffs’ definition of major concert venues is limited to arenas and amphitheaters with at least 8,000 seats and a minimum number of concerts each year. Stadiums, they argue, are too large and too infrequently-used for concerts to serve as meaningful substitutes, while smaller theaters cannot accommodate the scale of major touring acts.

Amphitheaters, Kessler claimed, are distinct in their outdoor configuration and the types of content they attract. Certain artists only perform in amphitheaters or structure their tours specifically around amphitheaters. It has not been disputed throughout the trial that an artist cannot conduct a nation-wide amphitheater tour without Live Nation.

Notably, antitrust trials are not a search for some “one true” market definition. As another judge wrote in the context of a grocery store merger, “[t]he fact that a different market could be drawn” is not fatal for a plaintiff’s case; the question is whether the market proposed is “an appropriate and relevant market” for the case at hand. Market definition is a tool for getting a ballpark sense of competitive intensity.

Live Nation called the States’ market definitions “gerrymandered.” Its lawyers contend that venues, artists and promoters operate across a fluid range of options — stadiums, arenas, theaters and amphitheaters — that compete with one another in ways the plaintiffs’ definition obscures.

“If Ticketmaster were a monopolist, really, genuinely, as they suggest, then what these plaintiffs would be telling you is that Ticketmaster monopolizes ticketing for large venues. It would be that simple…That’s not what they’re telling you,” Marriott said. He went on to mock the extravagantly intricate particulars of the way in which he claimed the plaintiffs carved out the definition of market.

Marriott also pointed to what he suggested were inconsistencies in the plaintiffs’ approach to market definition. At times, the market includes all events at major venues, including sports; at others, it is limited to concerts. At times, arenas and amphitheaters are treated as a single market; at others, arenas are said not to be meaningful substitutes for amphitheaters.

An Unexpected Attendee

After the sides concluded their arguments yesterday, the judge went through the seemingly never-ending charging sheet followed by the verdict form.

Nearly all lawyers on both sides left the gallery when Judge Subramanian began this process. However, in the third row of the plaintiffs’ side sat one lawyer alone: David Dahlquist. Dahlquist was the plaintiffs’ chief counsel until the DOJ decided to settle with Live Nation, reportedly at the direction of President Trump. The day before closing arguments, Dahlquist announced his resignation from the DOJ. He watched all day yesterday as the states concluded the case he helped bring.

By the end of the day Friday, the jurors had selected their foreperson and submitted a series of questions, ranging from expert testimony to guidance on interpreting the definition of relevant antitrust markets. They also asked whether the States have to prove every prong of a Section 2 claim or just some (and were told yes, the States have to prove every prong). Does that mean the jurors agree on some central proof points but are deadlocked on others? Or were they just asking for clarification early in their deliberation process?

The tired trial teams will be left speculating about the import of the jury’s handful of questions over the weekend—because the jurors, finally in control of their own schedule, sent the judge a note informing the court that they would leave at 4pm and resume deliberating on Monday.

Outside the jury’s presence, the judge and the parties continue to press forward on the case’s unresolved issues. Earlier this week, Judge Subramanian ordered that the AEG counsel who sent plaintiffs the secret Mueller termination documents must show cause as to why he should not be held in contempt of court. (If you’re not familiar with that story, read more here). And Judge Subramanian is still considering whether plaintiffs’ damages expert Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz’s testimony may be used to calculate damages if the jury finds liability.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Antitrust cases are often won or lost on reams of data and legal and economic theory ruled on solely by a judge. That a lay jury will instead decide whether Live Nation violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act may explain why Live Nation decided to close with Nur. As Drake’s manager, Nur represents the perspective of a uniquely prominent entertainer.

Jurors watched attentively as Nur appeared via video deposition, a format that typically lulls the courtroom to sleep. He portrayed Live Nation as nothing less than the best in the business, extolling its service, loyalty and fairness. He reviewed emails in which he called Drake’s work with Live Nation “the single most important relationship” of his career and described Michael Rapino as “one or none.” Beyond Live Nation, Nur vouched for Ticketmaster’s superiority, calling the company “so much easier” and “better” than its rivals.

Of course, Drake is no typical client. He is, by Nur’s account, the biggest artist on the planet, operating under terms that do not exist for anyone else. At one point, Nur was asked to interpret a lyric from Drake’s 2013 song Pound Cake: “The contract like ’91 Dan Marino, I swear this guy Michael Rapino boostin’ my ego.” Nur agreed that it likely referred to Drake’s favorable Live Nation contract.

Nur’s testimony followed Live Nation’s last expert witness—maybe its strongest. A central question the jury will decide is whether a distinct market exists for large amphitheaters, outdoor venues that seat at least 8,000 people. The plaintiffs argue that Live Nation has illegally monopolized this market, owning or exclusively operating 78 percent of large amphitheaters in the U.S. That power, plaintiffs say, is leveraged to condition access to its venues on using its promotion services.

The states have presented strong evidence of Live Nation’s sheer dominance within this market and its moves to shut out competitors and drive up prices. If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll recall the “robbing them blind” quotes. But that theory only holds if large amphitheaters cons1titute a distinct antitrust market.

Enter Live Nation’s economics expert Ali Yurukoglu. He testified yesterday that they do not. According to his analysis, artists routinely substitute arenas and other venues for large amphitheaters, which suggests the alleged market includes more than just amphitheaters. While a few artists perform exclusively in amphitheaters, most move between multiple types of venues. If a large amphitheater raised its prices or became unavailable, Yurukoglu said, artists would simply perform somewhere else, outside the amphitheater category.

The evidence of this, he said, could be found after the 2023 closure of the FivePoint Amphitheater in Los Angeles. Yurukoglu examined the artists who had performed there in the years prior to its closure and their behavior upon returning to the city afterwards. He found that when they returned, only about 20 percent of performers played in amphitheaters. The majority went to other venues. “To see that 80 percent of the time when it’s not available, they are going to something else,” he said, “that is not appropriate market definition,” referring to the alleged amphitheater market.

That being said, following the closure of FivePoint, Los Angeles was left with only one large amphitheater, the Hollywood Bowl. When it is not being used by the Los Angeles Symphony, the amphitheater is exclusively operated by one promoter. That promoter is none other than… Live Nation.

More technically, plaintiffs will likely argue in post-trial briefing that the standard question used to determine the boundaries of a relevant market is whether a hypothetical monopolist over that group of products (here, venues) would profitably impose at least a "small but significant and nontransitory" increase in price (the “SSNIP” test). And there’s nothing “small” about the impact of the FivePoint closure—instead it’s like a very large price hike.

With Live Nation having rested its case, tomorrow morning the parties will deliver their closing arguments. To be continued!

Also on deck: an update on how the judge ruled on Live Nation’s motions alleging perjury and witness tampering.

Big Tech on Trial is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

The day began with testimony from Dr. Dennis Carlton, a veteran economist with Compass Lexecon, and ended with Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz taking the stand for the second time in this trial—this time responding to allegations of perjury. If successful, the defense could have effectively removed the core of the plaintiffs’ damages claims in one day.

Judge Subramanian seemed to sense the marathon of what was to come when he popped open his Coke can before 9am.

Subscribe now

Live Nation Expert Claims No Evidence of Monopoly

Day 20 began with the defense calling expert witness Dr. Dennis Carlton, the well-seasoned economist whose prior controversial testimony in the AA-JetBlue Northeast Alliance case Matt Stoller wrote about in 2023. Carlton argued that if Ticketmaster exercised monopoly power, as the plaintiffs claim, it should appear in the company’s prices or margins for concerts at major concert venues, one of the key markets in this case.

According to Carlton, it does not. He testified Ticketmaster’s gross margins inside the major concert venue market are 66.3 percent. Outside, they’re 69.5 percent. Take rates, which function as a proxy for price, are 5.3 percent inside, 6.4 percent outside (from 2017-2023, excluding 2020).

The argument is appealing, at least if one assumes that market power must reveal itself in increased profits. The reality, however, is that monopoly power — and harm from anticompetitive conduct — do not need to result in higher take rates or margins. Ticketmaster can have monopoly power in the major concert venue market and engage in anticompetitive conduct that harms competitors and fans while also having lower profit margins compared to other markets. We’ll see if the plaintiffs touch on this in their closing argument.

Carlton also challenged aspects of Abrantes-Metz’s analysis. She had concluded that rival ticketing firm AXS had a better ticket-sell rate at concerts than Ticketmaster. Carlton testified that excluding what he characterized as an outlier—the world-famous Red Rocks Amphitheater ticketed by AXS—reversed that conclusion, giving Ticketmaster a higher sell-through rate.

Much of the remainder of Carlton’s testimony was technical and slow. He presented regression analyses more visually confusing than any I’ve seen presented at a trial. He then went through several analogies, including one involving his long-term relationship with his plumber. When you have a reliable plumber, you stick with them, he suggested. Of course, his plumber doesn’t have long-term exclusive contracts or 86 percent of all plumbing jobs in his local neighborhood.

Kessler Unleashed: Cross-Examination

Then came Jeffrey Kessler. He was energized and ready to attack in the most objection-laden cross-examination of this trial. It was courtroom theater to its fullest extent. He pressed Carlton on prior articles he had authored and revisited exhibits showing high Ticketmaster fees and poor quality, giving the jury another chance to absorb these documents.

Amid the barrage of objections and sidebar conferences, Kessler hammered the point that if Ticketmaster’s anticompetitive conduct was present both within and outside the major concert venue market, Carlton’s conclusions would largely collapse.

Abrantes-Metz Back on the Stand to Face Perjury Questions

By the time the jurors left for the day, all levity had left the courtroom with them. Dr. Abrantes-Metz took the stand to address the perjury allegations the defense fired at her last week. If Abrantes-Metz’s testimony is excluded, it’s a major setback for plaintiffs as they seek to quantify a potential award of monetary damages against Live Nation.

Abrantes-Metz was questioned by Judge Subramanian, who appeared, at least provisionally, to accept her explanation about how she interpreted the questions and why her answers were confusing. She essentially said she relied on Live Nation’s instructions simply for understanding its data and thought she was being asked about that on the stand. I wrote all about the defense’s accusation last week.

The rest of the hearing resulted in an extended discussion between the Court and counsel over whether excluding upfront payments in one of her models rendered her conclusions unreliable. It’s a rather technical issue that had been heavily contested before trial. The re-litigation of it very much resembled a statistics class taught by non-statisticians.

Judge Subramanian has yet to rule on Abrantes-Metz’s testimony.

While we’re entering the final days of testimony, the trial is far from over. The defense still has two more days of experts and other witnesses coming in to testify, and the judge still has a slew of motions to consider. Prior to the Justice Department’s departure from the case, trial had been expected to last through this Friday, April 10, then it’s in the hands of the jury. We’ll see if that timeline holds.

On Friday, one of Ticketmaster’s key witnesses sat on the stand to answer this question. Jennifer Johnson, Ticketmaster’s vice president of commercial strategy, insisted that long-term exclusive deals and their early renewals were not, as the states claim, a mechanism to monopolize. They were mostly favors to venues.

These deals take place in the major concert venue market, which the plaintiffs say consists of large amphitheaters and arenas that host nine or more concerts annually. In this market, venues typically enter into exclusive agreements with ticketing providers who are granted the right to sell tickets for all events at the venue. According to the plaintiffs, Ticketmaster is the exclusive ticketing provider for roughly 86 percent of the country’s major concert venues. They argue that the company’s long-term, exclusive contracts, many of which are renewed before competitors have a chance to bid, allow Ticketmaster to maintain market power and limit competition.

Johnson acknowledged that exclusive contracts benefit Ticketmaster, but said they are primarily what venues prefer. In this trial, several venue owners have relayed this same message. Several witnesses have testified that having multiple ticketing providers would create confusion among consumers and stymie efficiency within their venue.

More surprising was Johnson’s account of contract length and early renewals. Conventional wisdom might suggest that long-term exclusive contracts, renewed without a public request-for-proposal process, would serve Ticketmaster’s interests. Johnson, however, disputed that notion. “Shorter is probably better,” she testified. The longer the deal, the more risk. When contracts are extended, she said that it is “almost always driven by the client’s request,” often because venues receive larger upfront payments that can be used for immediate capital improvements or operating needs.

Similarly, she testified that the early renewals, in which contracts are renegotiated before they expire without other competitors bidding, tend to favor venues more than Ticketmaster. These deals allow venues to replace older contracts with more favorable terms ahead of schedule. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several venues renewed early and received significant upfront payments that helped them remain financially viable.

This concept sounds fine and dandy. But when Zach Biesanz from the Minnesota State AG’s office cross-examined Johnson on behalf of the plaintiffs, it turns out that Live Nation employees are incentivized to renew venues early and to sign long-term contracts. In one Slack exchange involving Johnson and other executives, employees were instructed to “continue to aggressively pursue early renewal opportunities to avoid RFP process.”

At least until 2024, Ticketmaster’s sales staff bonuses were tied in part to securing renewals, with higher payouts for contracts signed more than six months before they were set to expire. These incentive packages also included a “term length multiplier,” through which bonuses increase along with term length. In other words, employees were paid to make agreements both earlier and longer.

The purpose of those deals, the plaintiffs suggested, was not simply to serve venues but to preserve market share. After introducing internal Ticketmaster documents showing the company exclusively ticketed 84 percent of NBA and NHL arenas, Biensaz questioned Johnson about a presentation her team prepared regarding a potential deal with an arena in Anaheim, California, where one stated goal was to “maintain majority market share of NBA and NHL.”

Live Nation appears to use the same playbook in renewing its exclusive venue operating agreements. Earlier this week, Live Nation CFO Ben Weeden read through emails about an amphitheater in Scranton, Pennsylvania, it exclusively operates, the Pavilion at Montage Mountain. For years Live Nation operated the amphitheater at a loss. But in 2022, as it was up for contract renewal, Live Nation chose to keep the venue. Why? Not because it was profitable, but because they didn’t want a competitor to acquire it. In their words, “a decision was made to not give up a venue which competitors could snap up. So extend the lease.”

Monday kicks off the trial’s final week. Jurors will hear from several witnesses, including a key expert for the defense. Once the jury leaves on Monday, the plaintiffs’ damages expert will enter the courtroom to answer questions related to the defense’s motion to strike her testimony. The plaintiffs submitted their responding motion late last, though it is not yet public. So get ready for some fireworks.

At issue is the testimony of Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz, the states’ damages expert. She essentially quantified how much Ticketmaster’s alleged monopoly power costs fans. If the jury finds in the plaintiffs’ favor, they will likely use Abrantes-Metz’s calculations to determine the damages awarded to the states. Now, it is a question whether the jury will be allowed to consider her testimony at all.

Retained Amounts: How Fans Allegedly Got Overcharged

When Abrantes-Metz took the stand last Tuesday, she presented a model comparing Ticketmaster to its closest competitor, AXS. Her goal was to strip away all other variables that affect ticketing fees to isolate the impact of the alleged anticompetitive behavior.

She built her testimony around the concept of a “retained amount,” which she described as the portion of the ticketing fee Ticketmaster takes from venues. According to her calculation, Ticketmaster retained $2.30 more per ticket than AXS simply due to its anticompetitive behavior. Of that, between $1.56 and $1.72 were paid by fans through ticketing fees. That, she said, is the overcharge. Multiply it across every ticket sold in the plaintiff states from 2017 to 2024, and that is a lot of money.

The Critical Moment on the Stand

On the stand she repeatedly insisted that she relied on “instructions provided by Live Nation on how to calculate retained amounts.” But according to Live Nation, this is not true. She constructed the retained amount from Ticketmaster data; the company itself does not calculate or use this term.

According to Live Nation, she knew that it was not true, because Live Nation had previously argued that she should be barred from testifying because her model ignored upfront payments to venues—payments that, they said, affect ticketing fees. The plaintiffs argued that upfront payments were irrelevant to the calculation, and the judge allowed her to testify.

Following one exchange on the stand in which Abrantes-Metz claimed she followed Live Nation’s guidance, the judge asked plaintiffs’ counsel, Brent Nakamura at a sidebar, “Where is this coming from?” It had not previously been suggested that Live Nation or Ticketmaster defined or used the term in this way. Nakamura pointed to a footnote in her expert report. Trial continued. The defense now insists the footnote offers little more than “in-the-weeds” descriptions of “esoteric database entries,” not retained amounts.

The Defense Lobs Perjury Allegations

Accusing an opposing expert of perjury is rare and serious, but the defense nonetheless took this step.

“While we do not say this lightly, she has resorted to lying about the origins of this argument to defend her work and, in particular, to evade the critique that her concept of ‘Retained Amounts’ was made out of whole cloth,” the defense wrote in its memorandum.

The Judge’s Response

The judge signaled real concern about the issue during yesterday’s conference. “I honestly want to make sure the plaintiffs are taking this seriously,” he said at the outset. He denied their request for extra time to respond, ordering a reply by Friday, and instructed the plaintiffs to prepare to bring Abrantes-Metz back to court as early as Monday.

He flung around the words “inexplicable,” “perplexing” and “bewildering” to describe his questions about not only how the retained amount was presented but also how it was calculated. If I had to guess, I would bet that Abrantes-Metz unintentionally committed an error in describing the basis for her calculations.

We can’t say what will come of this situation until the plaintiffs file their response. It could be nothing, or it could very much be something. At a minimum, the plaintiffs are now forced to devote time to this issue that would otherwise be spent preparing for the remaining cross-examinations.

Out of all the obstacles that could have derailed the plaintiffs—not least that their DOJ counterparts abandoned them mid-trial—it’s hard to believe this could be among the most significant. And yet, here we are. Adding to the irony for the plaintiffs, the fact that Abrantes-Metz did not rely on Live Nation’s instructions in her calculations is almost certainly meaningless to jurors, buried beneath the flood of numbers and technicalities they have been asked to consider throughout this trial.

An Update on the Secret Bob Mueller Termination Documents

Abrantes-Metz was not the only topic discussed Wednesday. The judge started out the day by threatening to hold the AEG lawyer who sent Bob Mueller’s termination documents in contempt of court and then he heard arguments from both sides on the defense’s recently filed motion for judgement. If you don’t know about the secret AEG termination documents, I broke it down in a piece earlier this week. For those interested in the saga, redacted versions of the emails exchanged among those involved have now been made public.

And so this trial continues, with its nasty litigation.

On Monday, that same economist took the stand in Live Nation’s defense, a job for which he was paid a whopping $1 million.

“I do not see proof,” Budish testified, “that Ticketmaster’s high market share is because of the challenged conduct, as opposed to good old-fashioned competition on price and quality.”

As in any antitrust case, the plaintiffs’ burden is not just to show that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are big. but to explain why. If its market power flows from anticompetitive conduct, pressuring venues or squeezing competitors, that is unlawful. If it flows from offering a product that artists and venues prefer, that is competition doing what it is supposed to do.

Budish came armed as a UChicago economics professor, and brought analyses from a prestigious economic consulting firm, Cornerstone Research. His testimony was persuasive though narrow. He did not define the relevant markets, calculate Ticketmaster’s market share, or present evidence disproving the exclusionary conduct allegations. We understand future experts will cover these topics. Instead, he examined what he described as markers of high quality and low price that draw venues to Ticketmaster.

Why Ticketmaster Wins: Three Key Arguments

First, Ticketmaster sells more tickets per show than its rivals. According to his analysis, Ticketmaster sells 7 to 8 percent more tickets for any given show than its competitors.

Second, it has lower resell rates, meaning fewer of its tickets go to scalpers and more to fans compared to its rivals. He determined that Ticketmaster has a resale rate 7 to 12 percent lower than its rivals.

Lastly, he concluded that artists and venues make more using Ticketmaster. Using Ticketmaster’s platinum pricing tool, which allows artists to set prices for seats on an individual level, artists made over $400 million additional in 2024. He did not calculate the financial boost artists and venues receive from Ticketmaster’s competition.

According to Budish’s conclusions, these elements are the reason venues choose Ticketmaster. Not its anticompetitive conduct.

Economists’ Battle Over Barclays

If you’ve been reading Big Tech on Trial, you know that the Barclays Center drama has become a lighting rod in this trial. The arena switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek in 2021—a move that sparked a profanity-laced phone call between then-Barclays CEO John Abbamondi and Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino—and returned to Ticketmaster in 2023. The episode is cited by both parties’ experts as evidence supporting their arguments.

There is evidence that Live Nation retaliated against Barclays when it switched to Ticketmaster. In the year after Barclays switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek, its number of Live Nation concerts decreased from 23 to 14. Other NHL/NBA arenas saw no such decrease. In the year after Barclays switched back to Ticketmaster, it hosted 28 Live Nation concerts. This number has only risen year after year.

Yesterday, Budish presented the jury with a different take on the Barclays scandal. He found that artists who performed at Barclays when SeatGeek was the primary ticketing company sold fewer tickets for their shows at the venue compared to their other shows. When Ticketmaster was Barclays’ primary ticketing company, both before SeatGeek and after, artists sold more tickets at the venue than they sold elsewhere.

Did Barclays return to Ticketmaster because it sells more tickets or because Live Nation withheld content from its venue?

Capitol One Arena Exec Throws Support Behind Ticketmaster

Following Budish, Capitol One Arena executive James Van Stone testified in support of Ticketmaster. Van Stone oversees ticketing at the arena and praised Ticketmaster so highly that he extended his contract with the company two years before it was set to expire. His testimony was partially undercut when it was revealed that he is friends with the Ticketmaster executives who sign his arena’s contracts. They have provided him tickets to see Bruce Springsteen (his favorite artist) dozens of times, both domestically and abroad, sometimes paying for his tickets.

The jurors got a rude awakening when they entered the courtroom this morning. To stay on schedule, Judge Subramanian will extend proceedings next week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., an hour or two longer than each day thus far. We’ve already lost two jurors, and a third has raised an issue about her ability to continue serving. At least one juror celebrates Passover, so we will not be meeting on Wednesday.

The judge made sure to convene with the lawyers after the jurors left yesterday to get these details squared away. As he said, “it doesn’t pay to have surprises come up at the last minute,” an obvious nod to the parties’ tendencies to withhold information from the judge. If you missed it, he addressed this in an explosive hearing on Friday.

Today, Live Nation is continuing its defense.

The issue arose ahead of the morning’s testimony from Rick Mueller, an executive who left a job at Live Nation to join rival AEG for 13 years (where he served as president), before returning to Live Nation in 2024. On Tuesday, the plaintiff states received a “cover email” with document attachments relating to Mueller’s departure from AEG. It’s understood the email contained a termination letter reflecting that he agreed to resign so as to not be terminated for cause and some other damning information related to his termination that neither party was previously aware of.

The plaintiffs did not share the documents with the defense or Judge Subramanian. Two days later, however, Adam Gitlin from the plaintiffs’ team and Jennifer Giordano from the defense wrote to the judge that they had reached a tentative agreement to limit questioning of Mueller to the general circumstances of his departure, i.e., that he agreed to resign rather than be terminated for cause.

Thursday night this all unraveled.

The exact order of events is unclear, but at 5 p.m. plaintiffs emailed Judge Subramanian ex parte (privately) informing him that there was an issue related to Mueller. This email, the judge said, was imbued with “complete secrecy,” and so he convened a phone call at 8 p.m. with the parties (13 hours before Mueller was set to take the stand), during which he suggested counsel continued to be evasive. It was only after the call, when he received the document attachments from the email, that he understood the issue.

We don’t know the contents of these documents likely related to Mueller’s termination from AEG and the issue they presented, but Judge Subramanian said in court that this had been “brewing,” which was why it was “imperative to raise this issue in advance.” Are you getting tired of the word “issue” yet?

Counsel for Live Nation maintained that they, too, had only learned of the documents’ contents that evening. Judge Subramanian pushed, suggesting they should understand why it seems odd that the company for whom Mueller now works would not know the details of his departure from his previous place of work. Lawyer and Live Nation EVP Dan Wall said he had some awareness, but “nothing approaching the materials provided.”

The parties’ conduct outside the jury’s presence throughout this trial has been defined by dropping major issues on the judge at the last minute and without the involvement of their chief trial attorneys. Yesterday, Judge Subramanian said this was “a problem with both parties.” Of course, I could have told you that nearly three weeks ago when we learned how the DOJ-Live Nation settlement came to pass.

Gitlin seemingly wanted to use the contents of these secret documents in his cross-examination of Mueller yesterday. But it was just the day before that he and defense attorney Giordano told the judge about set terms for the scope of Mueller’s questioning, which did not include whatever specifics these documents contain. Judge Subramanian was not happy.

“Are you saying it was not a deal?” Judge Subramanian questioned, increasingly raising his voice. “Are you saying that you shouldn’t be held to the deal, subject to witness answers?” The judge asked Gitlin to respond yes or no: “Are you prepared to proceed under the arrangement described yesterday?”

When Gitlin obfuscated without a yes or no answer, the temperature definitely rose a couple of degrees in the courtroom.

“No, you’re not going to hold up your end of the bargain; I think the answer is a no,” Subramanian declared.

At this point, Gitlin was struggling to put forth a response. “Don’t look around,” the judge charged. If he was indeed looking around, I don’t know who he could’ve been looking to for support. Rockstar antitrust attorney Jeffrey Kessler, who swooped in after the DOJ settled to help take the states over the finish line, was absent yesterday. Fitting with the chaos of this trial, he appears to have had a medical issue arise. His team said he was getting a small procedure and hopes to return on Monday.

Gitlin argued that he shouldn’t be held to the terms of the tentative agreement because the deal wasn’t between lead counsel, and he has known Giordano for years, suggesting that made it less official.

“Unconvincing,” the judge responded, informing the parties that yesterday’s agreement would be final.

Moving to the defense, the judge ripped apart a defense attorney for emailing him Thursday night with a request to destroy documents (it’s unknown if it was related to the secret Mueller documents.) Dumbfounded, Judge Subramanian said he would not do so and that they should “never ever email a Court and tell them to destroy documents.”

Mueller Takes the Stand

After a sip of his Coca-Cola to turn the page, Judge Subramanian ordered the jury be brought in, and soon enough Mueller was on the stand. On direct, he testified about Ticketmaster being superior to AXS, AEG’s ticketing service. He said his promoters were routinely frustrated with AXS. In one email a promoter called AXS “the worst ticketing service,” “pathetic” and “#3 in a 2-horse race.” Another email featured a conversation discussing the potential that an AEG partner would ask to switch from AXS to Ticketmaster, which they described as a “nuclear option.”

Mueller Reveals Beliefs About Ticketmaster’s Anticompetitive Conduct

It’s fair to say that Gitlin did a far better job asking Mueller questions than he did answering Judge Subramanian’s, and, ultimately, that is what matters for the outcome of the case. The defense typically counters the claims of Live Nation witnesses who have praised Ticketmaster’s ticketing systems by presenting instances where those witnesses complained about or experienced issues with the company. Unless the ticketing issues are groundbreaking, it’s a limited argument, because as we’ve heard repeatedly throughout this trial, every ticketing platform has issues.

What Gitlin was able to extract from Mueller was not just previous troubles with Ticketmaster’s tech but also Mueller’s beliefs that Ticketmaster and Live Nation banded together to use anticompetitive tactics against rivals, the heart of this case.

I’ll walk you through a couple highlights.

In one email exchange, Mueller and another AXS employee discussed a successful pitch they presented to a potential client. The other employee followed up that the venue’s larger team preferred ACS and had a “bad taste” about Ticketmaster from previous experiences. Not long after, Mueller got word that the venue got Live Nation for booking, writing that as a result they would likely go with Ticketmaster for ticketing.

In another instance, Ticketmaster had sold tickets in a fashion that violated the terms of service for a show AEG was promoting. They agreed to invalidate the tickets but then began delaying the process. Mueller said on the stand that he believed Ticketmaster was slow-peddling not because they were technologically incapable of getting it done fast but because AEG is a competitor of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

Mueller also wrote in emails that Verified Fan, the Ticketmaster tool that makes customers register before buying tickets in an effort to prevent fraud, was ineffective and simply used to give Ticketmaster “exponentially” more data and, by virtue, a competitive advantage. In emails shown in court yesterday, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino was quoted as writing that Verified Fan was “just to tell artist agents that you tried to stop scalpers…” There are no claims in this case directly related to Verified Fan or any Ticketmaster tool for that matter, but Live Nation will spend the next week arguing that its market share is due to the quality of its products. If plaintiffs can poke enough holes in this, they’re in a good spot.

Ironically, the termination of Mueller from AEG was one of the more unremarkable moments of the testimony. The witness list is stacked with rival promoters, ticketing executives and venue owners, as well as Live Nation employees, relatives and, of course, the company’s single biggest individual stockholder. Let’s just say there’s more than enough bias on all sides, and Mueller blends right in. That being said, we can’t say what the impact would have been had Gitlin been able to reveal the substance of these documents. Whatever it is, it seems bad.

On Monday we will likely hear from one of the defense’s most important witnesses, expert economist Eric Budish.

As the defense opened its case, Omar Al-joulani, president of touring at Live Nation and brother-in-law to CEO Michael Rapino, testified that artists, not promoters, ultimately decide where and how they tour.

“I wouldn’t say I have any power,” Al-joulani told the court. He described a competitive environment in which multiple promoters (who organize concerts and tours for artists) vie for clients. Some artists end up choosing Live Nation for their shows and tours, and others, like Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Bruno Mars, don’t.

In addition to promoting artists, Live Nation owns or exclusively operates hundreds of venues across the U.S. It also owns Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticketing company. Unlike the ticketing contracts, which have taken center stage throughout this trial, Live Nation promoters rarely lock artists into long-term agreements, meaning the company must compete regularly to win tours.

Al-joulani, who has promoted for Jay-Z, the Weeknd and Shakira, insisted that Live Nation never forces artists on where to perform, calling the company “artist obsessed” rather than “venue obsessed.” He said any recommendations to play at a Live Nation-owned or Ticketmaster-ticketed venue are because of their respective benefits, not the shared ownership. Al-joulani labeled AXS, one of Ticketmaster’s biggest competitors, as “rudimentary,” using tools that “we would have had 15, 20 years ago.” Throughout his testimony, Al-joulani seemed to subconsciously shift between referring to Ticketmaster in the first person and third person.

He also dismissed claims that Live Nation monopolizes the amphitheater market, denying the market exists altogether. Other than Jimmy Buffet, he said he couldn’t think of an artist who’s done an amphitheater-only tour.

Ticketmaster Secretly Booms from Secondary Sales

On the stand a week ago, Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapino testified that Ticketmaster only participates in the secondary ticket market—where scalpers resell tickets at inflated prices—because the industry has failed to impose regulations he has long lobbied for.

Yesterday, one of the plaintiffs’ last witnesses, Ticketmaster executive David Marcus, carried the burden of answering for Rapino’s emails that suggest otherwise.

Marcus was presented with a 2023 Ticketmaster slide deck from an executive conference that celebrated the company’s booming secondary-ticket revenue. It described the company’s resale growth outpacing total company growth, with secondary sales soaring from $2 billion in 2019 to $4.3 billion in 2022.

In a separate email exchange, Rapino questioned Marcus about a Ticketmaster tool designed to prevent scalpers from dominating secondary sales: “Why do we care what ends up on secondary? We have secondary we want to be in secondary.” Marcus responded that zero resale was not the goal, but that it would be a problem if brokers captured all secondary tickets while fans received none. Rapino pushed back: “I don’t want to balance artists, fans, and brokers.” Marcus reluctantly acknowledged to the court that Rapino pushed a strategy of more business in the secondary market.

Among the other damning emails was one in which Marcus suggested they “boil the frog” by increasingly capturing revenue that would otherwise go to venues and then “negotiate down from strength driven by product adoption.”

Arid Testimony in Little Rock

The last witness of the day, an arena manager in Little Rock, Arkansas appeared via prerecorded deposition. Prerecorded depositions are notoriously dry, but this one reached new heights of aridness. Extracting information from him had the tediousness of an archeological dig where the discovery only surfaces after intense time and labor.

“Are you familiar with Ticket master’s anti-fraud tools?” a lawyer asked.

“I am familiar with Ticketmaster’s anti-fraud tools,” he responded.

“Do you have an assessment of the effectiveness of these tools?”

“I have an assessment of those tools.”

Lawyers from both parties chuckled as this pattern continued. At least one juror appeared to have fallen asleep, only lifting her to head the voice of Judge Subramanian announcing that the jury would be released, saying “I will not subject the jury to any more movies right now.”

Oak View Group (OVG), co-founded by the former CEO of Ticketmaster, is one of the largest venue management companies in the U.S. It owns a handful of arenas and manages more than 200 venues across the country. In those managed venues, it controls operations and advises on strategic decisions, including which ticketing service venues should hire.

The company is also required to push those venues to select Ticketmaster.

Contractual Obligation to “Sing the Praises of Ticketmaster”

On Wednesday, OVG president Chris Granger told the jury about a 10-year agreement it signed in 2022 with Ticketmaster. The deal guarantees Ticketmaster exclusive ticketing rights at venues OVG owns. More importantly, for the venues OVG manages it is required to advocate Ticketmaster to be the exclusive ticketing service. OVG is also required to act in the venues’ best interest.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Josh Hafenbrack laid it out: “So, one of these venues, their contract comes up for renewal, and what you are obligated to do is to go in and sing the praises of Ticketmaster to that venue, is that true?”

“Correct” said Granger.

It Goes Further…

At venues already using Ticketmaster, OVG must push not just for renewal, but for annual increases of at least 2 percent in Ticketmaster’s share of ticketing fees. At venues using rival ticketing services, OVG must advocate for switching to Ticketmaster and a 60/40 fee split agreement as part of the deal, with 60 percent going to the venue and 40 percent going to Ticketmaster.

But OVG’s own internal analysis showed that this deal was financially worse for the venues, the Hafenbrack argued. In 2023, six OVG-managed venues using Paciolan (a rival ticketing service) came up for renewal. Hafenbrack presented Granger with the results of an “apples-to-apples” study the company conducted, which found that all six would make less money under Ticketmaster’s required 60/40 split.

They all switched anyway.

Hiding the Ticketmaster Contract From Venues

Despite having a fiduciary duty to disclose “material information including conflicts of interest,” Granger admitted OVG did not tell these venues about its financial incentives from Ticketmaster, which include an annual bonus of up to $7.5 million and its $20 million signing bonus in 2022.

When pressed about this, Granger simply uttered that he didn’t know why they didn’t reveal this, followed by “we should have.” It was a rare moment of apparent regret and humility the likes of which this courtroom has seen little of over the past several weeks.

(Not coincidentally, the Antitrust Division had charged Tim Leiweke, the former CEO and co-founder of OVG, with bid-rigging, before Trump pardoned him last December. This deal with Ticketmaster is in the non-prosecution agreement with OVG. However, this whole saga didn’t come up at trial.)

Though Granger acknowledged that more competition generally produces better outcomes for venues, he also admitted that several of its managed venues have only had one competitor join the bidding process: Ticketmaster.

One of these, the XL Center in Hartford, Connecticut had to have two bidding processes after OVG failed to make the bidding process competitive. The city-owned arena, managed by OVG, switched from Paciolan to Ticketmaster in 2023 after a limited bidding process. After the city found out about this, they intervened and decided to oversee a new fully competitive process for the venue’s ticketing service. This time, Ticketmaster lost the contract to rival ticketing service AXS.

The most expressive juror of the bunch turned to look at her fellow jurors, as if to confirm she had heard correctly. As in the other shocking moments throughout this trial that prompted such a reaction from her, the other jurors kept their eyes forward, jotting notes on their notepads.

The Attempt to Defend

The defense, led by Lauren Moskowitz, one of Live Nation’s most skilled attorneys in this case, struggled to explain away what the jurors had just heard. She repeatedly honed in on the fact that the venues ultimately decide their ticketing service and some OVG-managed venues don’t hold any concerts.

At one point, attempting to downplay the 2 percent annual increase in Ticketmaster’s fee share, Moskowitz asked Granger whether the inflation rate since 2022 has exceeded 2 percent. When he said it had, she quipped, “I think we’ve all personally experienced that.”

The line, seemingly an attempt to connect with the jurors while simultaneously defending the spiking of fees towards Ticketmaster, fell flat.

Venue operators have testified that they faced threats or retaliation after switching from Ticketmaster, and rival ticketing companies have described being forced out of the market due to Ticketmaster’s long-term exclusive agreements with venues. Live Nation, on the other hand, has characterized its success as the product of innovation and superior quality.

On Monday and Tuesday, the plaintiff states brought in two expert witnesses, Dr. Nicholas Hill and Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz, to quantify Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s market share and conduct.

Subscribe now

The Barclays Debacle… Again!
The Barclays Center story has become somewhat of a Shakespearean tragedy in this trial. Repeatedly mentioned by various witnesses, the incident of Barclays switching from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek features a contract dispute, an expletive-laced phone call and alleged threats and retaliation by the most powerful live entertainment company in the world.

John Abbamondi, the arena’s former CEO, told the court that when he announced in 2021 that Barclays would switch from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino threatened and then withheld Live Nation concerts from the venue, including a Billie Eilish show that had previously been scheduled there. Rapino testified that the decline in shows at Barclays was the predictable consequence of the UBS Arena opening nearby, and his anger in the call reflected his surprise at Barclays trying to exit a contract early under a COVID clause no other arena had attempted.

Rapino’s testimony was persuasive on the stand, but the numbers, according to Hill, don’t support his version of events. Hill found that Barclays saw a sharp drop in Live Nation shows when it left Ticketmaster and (critically) a rebound when it returned to Ticketmaster the following year. In 2022, after Barclays switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek, it hosted 14 Live Nation shows, down from 23 in 2019. In 2023, after Barclays returned to Ticketmaster, it hosted 28 Live Nation shows, and in 2024, Barclays had 34 Live Nation shows.

Data Suggests Live Nation Retaliation
Hill extended this analysis to NBA and NHL arenas. From 2017 through 2024, venues that moved away from Ticketmaster saw Live Nation shows decline from an average of 17 to 11 in the year after switching; those that moved to Ticketmaster saw shows rise from 14 to 27. It’s hard to get a clearer picture of the conduct that the plaintiff states are alleging in this case than this.

This testament has been echoed throughout the trial. On Tuesday, Bryan Perez, the CEO of AXS, Ticketmaster’s biggest rival, detailed a number of venues that he said declined to sign with AXS as its primary ticketing service because they feared losing Live Nation shows. While powerful, Perez and others are, at the end of the day, Live Nation and Ticketmaster competitors. What makes Hill’s analysis so compelling is that the jury doesn’t have to speculate about motives or self-interest.

Damages Expert
More than ever, proving damages is essential for the states. They passed up cashing in on the $287 million DOJ settlement to push forward with the trial, betting that the jury will award them with even greater damages. On Tuesday, they called Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz, a University of Chicago economist who previously served as an expert witness on behalf of the United States against Google in the ad tech matter, which we covered here at Big Tech on Trial.

Abrantes-Metz accepted Hill’s findings that Ticketmaster dominates the market and engages in anticompetitive conduct as a given. From there, her job was to discern what Ticketmaster’s anticompetitive conduct actually costs fans.

Analyzing hundreds of contracts from 2018 through 2024, Abrantes-Metz concluded that Ticketmaster charges venues an extra $2.30 per ticket. Most of that—between 68 and 75 percent—gets passed directly to fans, meaning fans pay an overcharge of roughly $1.56 to $1.72 per ticket.

To measure the effect of Ticketmaster’s alleged anticompetitive behavior, Abrantes-Metz treated AXS as a benchmark for a competitive market. She concluded that the two companies were roughly comparable in quality and face-value ticket pricing, then stripped out all other factors that could influence a show’s cost. What remained, she testified, was a clear overcharge: Ticketmaster charged $2.30 more per ticket than AXS.

Was AXS really comparable to Ticketmaster in 2018? During a contentious cross-examination, the defense hammered at the fact that Abrantes-Metz treated AXS and Ticketmaster as comparable in quality from 2018 through 2024. Indeed, even the CEO of AXS and its parent company AEG have testified that AXS didn’t quite match up to Ticketmaster until after the pandemic. According to Abrantes-Metz’s data, though, the Ticketmaster overcharges have increased year-by-year, so the fact that she included 2018 and 2019 “only reduced” the calculated damages per ticket.

Expert testimony is always central to antitrust cases. In a trial decided in part by a jury, its impact can be hard to gauge. While the jurors undoubtedly understood that Abrantes-Metz concluded Ticketmaster to be overcharging $2.30 per ticket, much of her direct testimony was devoted to laying the groundwork of her analysis, which was less riveting than other testimony we’ve heard.

The sole doctor on the jury was taking notes throughout her testimony—others were fidgeting or closing their eyes at times.

The plaintiffs are expected to rest their case today!

Most of the day unfolded outside of the presence of the jury, with the parties discussing what the plaintiffs’ key expert, Dr. Nicholas Hill, will be allowed to include in his testimony on Monday. Dr. Hill is expected to present an analysis that examines the share of concerts at major concert venues (MCV) promoted by Live Nation. His report is likely to show that the share of concerts declines after a venue switches away from Ticketmaster.

The defense took issue with such analysis, arguing that the inclusion of promoters implies a distinct market between artists, promoters and concert booking, a litigation claim that Judge Subramanian has already dismissed. The judge rejected their argument, but he sided with them on a couple more narrow issues.

One Witness

The sole witness, Live Nation Touring Division VP Colin Lewis, gave the jury a different flavor of the testimony that we’ve heard repeatedly throughout this trial about Live Nation effectively excluding competitors from amphitheaters.

When AEG (a rival promotion company) sought to book a Ben Platt concert at the Hollywood Bowl during a period when Live Nation had exclusive access, Lewis wrote in an email, “No AEG under any circumstances.” In another instance, Live Nation staff considered hosting an AEG-sponsored tour featuring Kem and Babyface at the Concord Pavilion, another Live Nation amphitheater. To this, Lewis responded, “We’re not doing that.” Why? Because, as he said, “You can only play amps with us.” In a separate discussion about guarantees for a 2022 Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa tour, Colin said there was “no reason to pay them more because they don’t have options to play other amps.”

On the stand, Lewis said he intended these messages to be understood differently than how the plaintiffs suggested, but he offered little clarification on what he meant. Like other Live Nation/Ticketmaster employees, he said that it is uncommon for artists to structure tours exclusively around amphitheaters, though he maintained that such tours could, in theory, take place without relying on Live Nation venues. He also said that the company’s exclusive use of amphitheaters allows artists to receive greater revenue, as

Will They Settle?

In the final minutes of the day’s proceedings, Judge Subramanian asked if there were any updates on settlement discussions. Surprisingly, there were.

NY State Attorney General Antitrust Chief Elinor Hoffman, who hasn’t spoken in court since she announced that she would lead the states’ settlement consortium two weeks ago, said that the states had made a counteroffer to Live Nation on Wednesday. Both sides seemed to be under the impression that Live Nation was considering the offer. Dan Wall, Live Nation’s top counsel, said the company was understandably busy the previous day with Michael Rapino’s testimony, but that they would get back to the states shortly. Judge Subramanian even offered to provide the parties with a magistrate judge later that afternoon, but they opted to wait for Live Nation’s response before going down that path.

This was the first the courtroom has heard of continued negotiations since the trial recommenced without the DOJ. There is no way of knowing how close the sides are to making a deal. It’s difficult to imagine the states agreeing anything close to the DOJ’s settlement terms.

That settlement leaves intact much of Live Nation’s vertically integrated structure. The company’s so-called flywheel, across promotion, ticketing and venues, allows it to absorb concessions in one segment and potentially recoup losses in another. Consider the settlement requirement that that Ticketmaster impose a 15 percent fee cap on ticketing fees at amphitheaters. Even if Ticketmaster lowers its fees at amphitheaters, Live Nation, which would still owns or exclusively operate the top amphitheaters in the U.S., could offset that cost through ancillary fees, like the $15 lawn chair rentals that took center stage on Thursday.

The DOJ settlement was reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been conceived after lobbyists and powerful industry executives, including WME CEO Ariel Emmanuel, appealed directly to Trump to settle the deal.

The states AG’s have their own motivations, some of which are undoubtedly political as well. It may not bode well with their constituents to settle with Live Nation on unfavorable terms after embarking on this widely popular war against the company.

Following news of the DOJ settlement Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced the Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act to reform the Tunney Act, the process by which courts approve settlements like this.

You should expect an interesting report on Monday’s events. Either there will be big settlement news, or we will hear from the plaintiffs’ key expert. Or both.

Across from him was famed antitrust attorney Jeffrey Kessler, now representing the states. Kessler, who typically comes off as affable and endearing, spent the day on the offensive, aggressive and relentless in his questioning.

Subscribe now

Rapino on Defense

Some of Kessler’s best work came from letting the story Live Nation sells to its investors speak for itself. The high ROIs, graphs and investor presentations described how the company maintains a successful “flywheel” between its various entities.

Rapino, in calls and emails to investors, boasted that Live Nation has outperformed the market for 20 years, is “recession-proof,” and that he had built "an incredible moat around the castle of Live Nation.” Following the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, he told investors, “Although we didn’t brag about this during the DOJ years…we have incredible market power around the world.”

Kessler extrapolated details that made Live Nation’s conduct appear incredibly anti-competitive. He questioned Rapino about his relationship with Oak View Group, a venue management firm co-founded by the former Ticketmaster CEO.

In 2022, Live Nation signed a 10-year contract making it the exclusive ticketing service for OVG’s owned and managed venues. Rapino insisted the deal benefited OVG—and it surely did—but at what expense? When coupled with Live Nation’s existing dominance and other exclusive agreements, the line of questioning framed Live Nation and OVG as partners in segmenting the marketplace to benefit each other, while hiking ticket prices, boxing out independent promoters, and depressing artist compensation.

An executive from Paciolan, another ticketing company, testified on Wednesday that the OVG/Live Nation deal pushed his company out of several venues he previously ticketed without being given the opportunity to put in an offer for renewal.

The $15 Lawn Chair Ban

Smaller, more concrete examples of the company’s behavior appeared to resonate with the jury. Chief among these was Live Nation’s recently instituted policy banning fans from bringing lawn chairs to its amphitheaters. Instead, they are charged $15 a pop to rent one from the venue itself.

Rapino initially defended the policy as a safety measure, but that explanation fell apart when a Live Nation slide deck touted “higher penetration from policy to no longer allow lawn chairs in most venues.”

In less than a year, the lawn chair rental fee at just 12 amphitheaters resulted in a $7 million increase in revenue for the company.

Kessler Struggled to Paint the Full Picture

Of course, to succeed in this trial, the plaintiffs must prove that Live Nation is more than a big company with aggressive business tactics. While Kessler’s questioning pointed to discrete examples of Live Nation’s size and anticompetitive tactics, it didn’t quite coalesce into a single, persuasive story of a company exercising monopoly power to crush its rivals. He jumped abruptly from European ticketing systems to amphitheater tours to fan-club allocations to ticket fees without a clear through-line.

Having been on the case for little more than a week, Kessler appeared to lack the depth of understanding to fully connect his arguments or corner Rapino on the evidence. He misread data in several presentations, conflated Live Nation Entertainment entities and had no response when Rapino insisted the Taylor Swift ticketing fiasco was merely a cyberattack.

One might otherwise have forgotten how new Kessler is to the case had he not asked Rapino a question premised on the mistaken assumption that Rapino was at opening statements for this trial, which neither of them attended.

Rapino the Likeable CEO?

Rapino, by contrast, had clearly been preparing for this moment for much longer. After all, the DOJ first started investigating the company in 2018. It is not easy to appear likeable as the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company accused of being a monopoly, yet Rapino somewhat managed it. Though at times evasive, he was at others relatively charming. He repeatedly answered questions to which an objection was raised but not yet ruled on, and he joked about forgetting this courtroom “rule” nearly every time, including telling the plaintiffs they got a freebie, which elicited laughter from the jury.

Rapino skillfully re-framed the company’s actions as well-intentioned business decisions. He described Live Nation’s dominance in the amphitheater market as a product of necessity rather than pure ambition. He explained that arenas are prohibitively expensive; he has never been able to purchase one. Because he couldn’t compete in this market, amphitheaters “became this one segment where it seemed unique that we could participate,” he said. To allow other promoters to run shows in amphitheaters Live Nation had poured roughly a billion dollars into, would be akin to building a hotel and letting the “other guy” put rooms in it.

Rapino also addressed some of the controversies that have plagued the company throughout the trial. He disavowed the text messages sent from Ben Baker, calling them “disgusting” and “not the way we operate,” although after-the-fact rationalizations tend to hold less weight than past, contemporaneous musings.

During cross-examination, Rapino offered a compelling explanation for a phone call between him and John Abbamondi (then CEO of Barclays) in which Abbamondi claimed Rapino had threatened the Barclays Center after it switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek. From Rapino’s perspective, the purpose of the call was to give Ticketmaster a previously “promised” last-look to match competing offers. He was caught flatfooted when Abbamondi joined the call with a lawyer and announced that the decision had already been made. Then, when Abbamondi mentioned Live Nation, Rapino said he took it as an effort to entrap him in the event that Barclays’ Live Nation content decreased following the switch. He thus reminded Abbamondi of the new competitor coming to town (UBS), which would impact content irrespective of the promoter.

Rapino maintained that his goal is to continue increasing all of Live Nation’s ROIs. He intends to expand his existing share of the markets in which his business operates. He does not intend to slow down, although this trial might do so for him.

Whether this is enough is for the jury to decide. And with many more witnesses to come, the verdict is still out.

The plaintiffs argue that venues face a non-choice: sign with Ticketmaster, or lose access to Live Nation’s concerts. They allege that this behavior, coupled with the monopoly power Live Nation/Ticketmaster allegedly assume, is anticompetitive and in violation of the Sherman Act.

On Wednesday, the court heard from Mike Evans, president of arenas at Live Nation Entertainment. Evans works a unique role in the company–he is neither a promoter nor a ticketer. Rather, he is contracted by arenas to bring content to their venues.

The junior attorney who questioned him went all the way back to 2011. In 2011, both Live Nation Entertainment (arenas) and Ticketmaster were negotiating contract renewals with the Barclays Center. Emails from the period show Ticketmaster executives instructing Evans to tell the venue that the company’s partnership “spans well beyond ticketing” and to caution Barclays that the company does not “work cooperatively to help make the Nets/Barclays lots of live event money while losing money on the ticketing side.” Evans confirmed that he, the company chairman and CEO Michael Rapino had all delivered this message.

In the emails, Evans then mused that an executive overseeing promotion had “no problem telling [Barclays] next week that he has other options with Madonna.” Barclays had previously been told they were getting these Madonna shows in question.

Evans offered impassioned but not benign explanations for these emails on the stand. He insisted that he and his colleagues never told Barclays that shows would be withheld if the venue declined to use Ticketmaster. The defense emphasized that these messages were more than a decade old.

The plaintiff states then highlighted a 2017 example involving H-E-B Center outside Austin, Texas. At the time, the venue was considering switching ticketing to SeatGeek. Emails show Evans and Ticketmaster executives discussing how and when to alert a regional Live Nation promoter about the venue’s potential departure from Ticketmaster, with one executive advising that the promoter, to the extent he is close to confirming shows for this venue, “go silent on it for a few days.” The venue eventually chose Ticketmaster as its primary exclusive ticketing service.

Other testimony throughout the day highlighted how Ticketmaster employees allegedly use Live Nation’s content as leverage. Clay Luter, executive vice president and co-head of sports at Live Nation, was questioned via aecorded deposition about instructing staff to highlight the company’s content offerings when pitching Ticketmaster to Boston University. He didn’t deny this, but rather said that he was speaking of how Ticketmaster could help bring in all sorts of content.

The last key witness of the day was Christian Lewis, chief revenue officer at Paciolan, a white-label ticketing provider that works with venues. Paciolan was originally part of Live Nation but was given up in 2010 as part of the consent decree that allowed the company to merge with Ticketmaster. The platform is not consumer-facing. Rather, it creates and manages ticketing systems for venues/universities that control the front facing ticket offerings.

Lewis described how Paciolan’s contracts include exclusivity clauses, a standard in the industry designed to ensure that venues rely on a single primary ticketing service. In practice, Lewis said, Live Nation routinely pressures Paciolan’s venues to waive these provisions, almost always for Ticketmaster.

For a Beyoncé concert at the University of Minnesota, Lewis said that a request from Live Nation, which the gallery could not see, “mandated that Ticketmaster be the ticketing provider. And if not, they would not recommend the show coming to the venue.” In a monotone voice, Lewis emphasized that while Paciolan could have handled the ticketing, the university had no real choice but to use Ticketmaster for this concert. Access to Live Nation’s content was conditional on using Ticketmaster.

By the time this piece lands in your inbox, I will likely be in the courtroom hearing testimony from Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, who is expected to take the stand today.

When the famed antitrust attorney took the podium for the first time today, it was immediately clear that his expertise spans both the knowledge of the law and the captivation of a courtroom.

For Ben Baker, head of ticketing for Live Nation venues, Kessler’s appearance was bad news. Baker, as I noted in an article three days ago, has become famous thanks to a trove of texts released as evidence for this case in which he casually joked with a colleague about gouging fans.

Kessler led Baker through a painstaking, line-by-line review of several messages he sent to a colleague in 2022, when both he and the colleague were managing amphitheaters for Live Nation. Baker and the colleague bet on how much they could charge fans for VIP packages and parking amenities, exchanging laughs as Baker referred to the paying fans as “stupid,” writing “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them.”

Baker responded to the barrage of texts with “unfortunately” and “regrettably” several times over, and he said that these texts were an immature way conveying his surprise that the demand existed to charge such high amounts.

The real kicker in the direct examination came when Kessler got to Baker’s “robbing them blind” text. Baker had sent his colleague a chart showing revenue increases from VIP parking over time. “In truth sir, what you really were doing there, in your words, was ‘robbing them blind baby. That’s how we do,’” Kessler read from the screen.

Jurors’ eyes widened as the message was read aloud.

In a standard antitrust trial, these messages would undoubtedly be embarrassing but might not impact the outcome of the case. The vast majority of antitrust cases are decided solely by judges, who are trained to limit their evaluation to logic and the law. In this case, because the states are seeking damages in addition to injunction, a jury is present. Juries bring to bear emotions and passions, and they are told to rely on their own memory of evidence presented during the trial.

Kessler spent part of the day trying to strengthen claims about Live Nation using anti-competitive tactics to squeeze competitors. He questioned former Live Nation chief operating officer Mark Campana about emails showing that another Live Nation employee, Brad Wavra, had repeatedly told venues that if they wanted Live Nation Entertainment shows, they needed to switch their ticketing service from AXS (AEG) to Ticketmaster. Kessler then walked Campana through a laundry list of small venues and promoters the company bought and converted into Live Nation/Ticketmaster machines.

To suggest that these acquisitions were motivated by the desire to stymie competitors, Kessler presented Campana with an email he received in 2015, which listed strategic justifications for buying the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Alpharetta, Georgia:

1. Consolidate the Atlanta outdoor venue market, which is a top 10 market.

2. Stop the threat of AEG from acquiring the venue and entering the Atlanta market, where they currently have no venue market.

3. If AEG were to acquire Alpharetta it would threaten the existing ticket market contract in place there i.e. potential lost business.

4. Should be considerable talent savings in the first few years since Alpharetta at times has made excessive offers to artists to lure them to the venue. At times, we have had to raise our offers to compete, therefore artificially inflating the artist value in the market.

According to Campana, Live Nation acquired these small and regional companies across the country to fill existing holes the company had in its national network. By gaining access to venues and promoters specialized in local markets, the company could improve its tours and events.

Oddly, the plaintiffs’ final witness of the day, Ben Lovett, ended up offering support for Campana’s point. Lovett, a guitarist for the band Mumford & Sons and an owner/operator of the Orion Amphitheater in Huntsville, Alabama, testified via recorded deposition. To him, Live Nation is just another competent concert promoter. During the Mumford & Sons summer 2025 tour, the band used multiple promoters, including but not limited to Live Nation. The band is currently on a tour primarily promoted by Live Nation, but Lovett said they chose the company because “someone’s got to promote those shows and they are one of the best promoters and the relationship has served us well.”

Even worse for the plaintiffs, Lovett’s Huntsville amphitheater has an exclusive ticketing contract with AXS (AEG’s ticketing service) that it doesn’t appear too happy with. Lovett said the response to AXS at the venue has been mixed, with one of its flaws being that it is less technologically developed in ticket segmentation than he understands Ticketmaster to be. To be honest, I’m not sure why the plaintiffs’ called Lovett. But that might be the cost of having an under-prepared legal team litigating the case.

More soon.

That was how Jay Marciano, CEO of AEG Presents and COO of AEG, described what he sees as the consequence of Live Nation’s dominance over major concert venues. After a week-long pause, the historic antitrust trial resumed on Monday in full force.

AEG is the closest thing Live Nation Entertainment has to a full-scale rival. Like Live Nation, AEG has a promotion arm (AEG Presents) and a ticketing arm (AXS). And though it is Live Nation’s biggest competitor, Live Nation still dwarfs the company. Live Nation’s promotion business is roughly three times the size of AEG Presents and Ticketmaster is more than ten times that of AXS.

Marciano testified that Live Nation’s long-term exclusive contracts with venues prevents AXS from competing on equal footing. In most major U.S. venues, he said, AEG is required to hand ticketing operations to Ticketmaster, its direct competitor.

“We produce the show… we put together a promotion campaign,” he said. “And then in most major venues in the United States we’re required to turn the ticketing over to our direct competitor, which is Ticketmaster.”

Zach Bryan’s Ticketmaster-Free Tour

Marciano pointed to Zach Bryan as an example of Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s dominance. In 2023, Bryan wanted to build a tour around venues that didn’t have exclusive Ticketmaster contracts. Bryan didn’t like Ticketmaster, and, being promoted by AEG Presents, he asked the company to book tour venues that did not have these exclusive Ticketmaster agreements. AEG followed through, and the tour largely, though not entirely, avoided Ticketmaster venues.

In 2024, Bryan returned to working with Live Nation and Ticketmaster for parts of his next tour, which Marciano said “exceed[ed] the profitability” of the 2023 tour. The moral of the story, he implied, was that artists may want alternatives, but to mount a successful tour, they must continue to use Ticketmaster. If fans are frustrated with the numerous issues he suggested they regularly encounter with Ticketmaster, they also have nowhere else to go to purchase their tickets.

This conjure might be an example of monopoly power or simply a reflection of how the industry operates in America.

AEG is more international than Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Marciano supports some of the “open-room” systems offered throughout Europe, in which venues are not locked into long-term exclusive agreements.

The idea of open-room agreements is so unpopular in the United States, however, that despite multiple proposals, no venues have agreed to this type of contract from AXS.

The Success of Live Nation Amphitheaters

The jury next heard from Robert Roux, who has overseen Live Nation’s U.S. concert division since 2010, including its amphitheaters. Live Nation owns or exclusively books over 60 of the top 100 amphitheaters in the U.S. The states’ argue that Live Nation conditions venue access on signing with the company as a promoter.

Emails shown to the jury detailed how Live Nation pushed to expand its amphitheater ownership. Those it owns have also grown more profitable over time. A slideshow shown to the court pointed to a 46 percent increase in per-fan profitability at amphitheaters from 2019 to 2022.

Either We Are Together or We Are Competitors

Three amphitheaters Live Nation exclusively books were previously under deals with Red Mountain Entertainment, a small regional promoter in the south. Live Nation bought the promoter and its venues in 2018.

When Roux was first made aware of Red Mountain, in 2016, he wrote that he would make sure territorial managers develop plans to “mitigate any expansion,” that Live Nation could not “get complacent and let small guys encroach from the edges.”

Two years later, Red Mountain was exploring a potential sale, and Live Nation expressed interest in acquiring it. Rapino expressed concern to Roux about continuing to host Live Nation shows at Red Mountain venues while the company’s future relationship with Live Nation was still uncertain.

Roux then told Red Mountain executives, “Either we are together or we are competitors.” He told Rapino at the time that this message “seemed to work as [Red Mountain has] three venues, two festivals and another venue coming online in [2018] and want the content flow on artists where we have touring rights in the U.S. Velvet hammer.”

Alignment with Live Nation preserved access to its touring artists; independence relinquished that access.

Live Nation promotes 90 percent of concerts at its own amphitheaters. Roux acknowledged instances in which the company declined proposals from outside promoters, even when those deals would have generated substantial revenue. In one case, Live Nation rejected an event proposal from Disney, despite an estimated financial upside of $400,000-500,000, seemingly due to concerns about allowing other promoters into its venues. The states argue that such decisions amount to exclusionary acts designed to limit competition.

Roux’s testimony wrapped earlier today. And the states will continue their case.

When the federal settlement was announced, these states declared that the terms of the deal were inadequate and vowed to “keep fighting this case without the federal government.” They insisted to the judge, however, that they would need 60 days to prepare in the absence of the DOJ. Rather than grant the delay, the judge sent the parties into five days of forced negotiations.

During this period, some state attorneys general decided to settle with Live Nation. So far, Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota have either settled with Live Nation or indicated their plan to do so.

The terms of the settlement are a far cry from the relief initially sought: the breakup Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The current deal aims to reduce Live Nation’s power in the industry, mainly through behavioral remedies. Live Nation/Ticketmaster will give up control of 13 amphitheaters across the country, limit its exclusive ticketing contracts to four years, cap ticketing fees at 15 percent and allow venues to sell a portion of secondary tickets through other ticketing services (if they so choose).

The settlement also requires that the company pay damages of up to $280 million to plaintiff states, which amounts to 1.1 percent of what the company made in 2025. Lawyers for Live Nation said that this provision was written with the expectation that all plaintiff states would settle, so it is unclear what the settling states will now receive.

For Live Nation, this deal appears to be a win. Last Monday, following the news of the settlement, its shares rose by at least 6 percent. But the case is far from over. First, for the settlement to be finalized, Judge Subramanian must review the agreement and determine whether it is in the public interest (a process called the Tunney Act).

And second, the rest of the plaintiffs haven’t agreed to end litigation. A bipartisan group of 33 state attorneys general did not settle and announced that they will officially be moving forward with the antitrust trial starting Monday. The decision marks a major moment for this case. A week ago, the DOJ was leading the plaintiffs’ arm of litigation. Now, mid-trial, the plaintiffs have splintered: the DOJ is no longer part of the trial team, and a remaining group of states has taken over as the sole plaintiffs arguing before the jury.

The jury, which has been off for the past week, will return, and the trial will resume exactly where it left off, in the middle of the direct examination of one of the plaintiffs’ key witnesses, the CEO of AEG, the second largest live concert promoter. What remains of his direct testimony will be led by a lawyer he has never met in person.

For the first time since the trial began, the DOJ team will not be seated at the plaintiffs’ table. In their place will sit state attorneys general and their newly retained co-lead counsel, Jeffrey Kessler and his team from Winston & Strawn. Kessler has a long career in anti-trust litigation, and it’s hard to overstate the impressiveness of his track record. He helped litigate against the NFL to establish free agency, he successfully arguing the landmark case to the Supreme Court against the NCAA that opened the door to NIL payments for college athletes, and he recently defeated NASCAR in a case brought by Michael Jordan. This guy’s a winner. That said, it’s unclear how effective the state litigation effort will be with such a rush job.

Why are Certain States Determined to Push Forward?

The states are moving forward because they believe the DOJ-Live Nation settlement does not address the broader structural issues that are core to the monopoly claims. The 2010 consent decree, which allowed Live Nation and Ticketmaster to merge, included anti-retaliation provisions meant to prevent the company from using its market power to disadvantage competitors. In 2019, the DOJ concluded that Live Nation “repeatedly and over the course of several years engaged in conduct that, in the Department’s view, violated” the consent decree. As a result, the DOJ and Live Nation agreed to extend the consent decree and modify its terms.

And yet, the original lawsuit brought by the DOJ and this consortium of states alleged that Live Nation was nonetheless able to maintain a monopoly.

In other words, the states still pursuing the case are unconvinced that another set of conduct rules and some divestiture in the industry will meaningfully change Live Nation’s power over the live concert market.

“Robbing them blind”

If the public was not already on board with the plaintiffs of this case, text messages between Live Nation employees released this week appear to have done the job. These exchanges, a few of which I’m including below, were written in 2022 by Ben Baker and Jeff Weinhold, both of whom worked as regional ticketing directors for Live Nation amphitheaters at the time. Baker now serves in a more senior role and is expected to testify in this trial.

They effectively reveal “behind-the-scenes” conversations about tactics to up-charge fans through ancillary fees, like as parking and seating upgrades.

Exchange One

Baker: These people are so stupid
Weinhold: I have VIP parking up to $250 lol
Baker: I almost feel bad taking advantage of them

Exchange Two

Baker: I charge $50 to park in the grass lmao
charge $60 for closer grass
Weinhold: VIP parking was supposed to be 5/5. I now START at $100
Baker: 5/5 for one way valet
$100 for oversize which doesn’t give you ANY benefits theres no RV plug in’s AND you still ahve to walk 3/4 of a mile
hahahaha
Baker: lol

After sharing a spreadsheet showing that premier parking gross revenue had jumped from $460,475 in 2018 to 666,230 in 2021, Baker texted Weinhold, “Robbing them blind baby” and “That’s how we do.”

There are many more pages of exchanges between Weinhold and Baker. The rest are quite interesting, and perhaps I’ll go through them at some point. As for the case, expect more to come on Monday when we see the new team in action.

Today the Live Nation antitrust case descended into further chaos, just one day after the DOJ and Live Nation announced a sweeping settlement, which was reached a week into trial without the knowledge of the judge or the involvement of any of the 40 states who are co-plaintiffs in the case.

Arun Subramanian, the federal judge presiding over the case, ordered the remaining plaintiffs (the states) and Live Nation into emergency settlement talks through the end of the week. If they fail to reach a deal, the trial could resume next Monday, this time without the federal government participating.

In the meantime, amid concerns that the states lack the resources to backfill the absence of 40 DOJ litigators, the state AGs have hired heavy-hitter Jeff Kessler, co-executive chairman of law firm Winston & Strawn, as lead counsel.

Subramanian opened Tuesday’s proceedings by continuing his rebuke of the DOJ and Live Nation for signing their settlement agreement under the cover of darkness. According to the judge, the parties executed a term sheet last Thursday but allowed the trial to continue as scheduled the following day. Counsel for both parties even met with the judge in chambers Friday without mentioning that a deal had been signed. Subramanian said he did not learn of the agreement until Sunday night, and he did not see the document until Monday morning, when he requested it.

What’s more, several lawyers actively trying the case appear to have been unaware that the settlement had been reached, including the DOJ’s lead trial counsel and the Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for its Antitrust Division. It’s still unclear exactly when counsel for Live Nation knew of the signed agreement. The judge said it was “mind-boggling,” that trial counsel continued working through the weekend preparing filings and evidentiary submissions while “the leadership of the United States and Live Nation were fully aware they had a signed term sheet and would not be proceeding.”

For now, the settlement binds only the DOJ and Live Nation, not the co-plaintiff states. Under the term sheet, Ticketmaster’s ticketing fees would be capped at 15% and Live Nation would divest its exclusive booking agreements with 13 amphitheaters, though could continue to own and operate them. Notably, the Complaint alleges that Live Nation controls 373 venues globally and more than 265 in North America alone, including 60 of the top 100 amphitheaters in the country. Live Nation would also pay $280 million in damages to the states, but only if they agree to the settlement. There’s a lot more in the term sheet that warrants close review, but several state attorneys general have said its inadequate to resolve anticompetitive concerns.

Naturally, no states have agreed to the terms laid out in the settlement. The states received the proposed term sheet at 4:07 p.m. on March 5, with a requested response by 5:00 p.m. on March 6. When the settlement became public yesterday, the states moved for a mistrial or a stay, arguing that they would need more time if they were to proceed without the help of the DOJ.

Submramanian quickly shut down this argument today, just as he did yesterday. “The states understood that a settlement between the government and Live Nation was contemplated as early as January 29,” he reminded them. By requesting a mistrial now, he said, the states are making an “about-face” based on “their own failure” to prepare accordingly.

Live Nation initially opposed the mistrial/stay request, but reversed its position late Monday night, citing the unusual circumstances of the case. If granted, and no settlement is reached, the states would eventually either resume the case where it left off or start the trial over from scratch. Subramanian declined to rule immediately on the motion and instead ordered Live Nation and the states to spend the week negotiating. He told them that they already had “the right people here, in court” to work it out. He has practically given them full rein of the courthouse, including his robing room and a magistrate judge if requested.

Whether they can actually reach an agreement by the end of the week remains anyone’s guess, but it seems unlikely. The chief of the Antitrust Bureau at the New York Attorney General’s Office could not name all members of the state settlement committee, the group who will be negotiating on behalf of the states. Stunned, Subramanian asked, “How can you not be 100 percent sure who is on the state settlement committee? Maybe that’s part of the problem.”

Live Nation’s confidence in striking a deal with the states was effectively nonexistent. Dan Wall, speaking on behalf of the company, told the court that “The probability of us reaching a resolution this Friday is about 0.” Different states were asking for different terms, he explained, and he still wanted to “stick the landing” with this hypothetical deal. Subramanian wryly reminded him that Michael Rapino had managed to do exactly that with the DOJ in just a couple of days. When Wall doubled down on his pessimism about reaching a deal, the judge quipped, “not with that attitude.”

The hearing ended with a pair of unannounced appearances in the gallery. First, the lawyer for the CEO of AEG Presents — who had been in the middle of direct examination Friday — appeared. His client, now on his way back to Los Angeles, might resume his testimony next Monday with a set of lawyers he has never met. Barely two minutes later, as Subramanian was in the middle of asking the states about outside counsel, Kessler sprang from his seat at the back of the courtroom, waving his arms and shuffling through the rows to announce himself. Subramanian, finally embracing the chaos, let out a laugh.

By the end of the week, we will learn whether the states can reach an agreement with Live Nation, whether the mistrial motion will be granted or if the trial will resume Monday, picking up exactly where it left off (minus the DOJ).

I will write with more updates as they come!

The details are probably the least important part of the deal, but here’s what the chatter suggests. It involves Live Nation paying $300 million to states for restitution, some behavioral remedies to allow rivals to sell tickets, a restriction on exclusive contracts, and the sale of 10 amphitheaters. That said, this consent decree would be the third such decree since 2010, and none of them have delivered competition to the market. So there’s no reason to assume this one will either.

There are a bunch of oddities here. First, the settlement was seemingly hidden from Judge Arun Subramanian. The term sheet was signed on March 5th by the CEO of Live Nation and the Acting Assistant Attorney General. The following day, there was a meeting in chambers with the judge. No one brought up the fact that there was movement with a settlement.

“It was never stated to me that there was an executed term sheet that was signed the prior day,” Judge Subramanian said.

The judge apparently first found out about the executed term sheet last night. “Among other things I received notification of at 8pm last night that the parties had a term sheet,” he said. “You know what was not attached to that email? A term sheet.” He didn’t get eyes on the term sheet until 6:30 am this morning. The closest to irate this otherwise temperate judge has gotten, he told the DOJ and Live Nation that their conduct “shows absolute disrespect for the court, for the jury, for this entire process.”

And that’s not all. David Dahlquist, who is lead counsel for DOJ, didn’t see the term agreement till this morning either, the same time as the judge. That’s extremely weird, and suggests this deal was cooked up by the higher up politicos. It’s unclear exactly when Live Nation’s counsel learned that the term sheet had been executed.

“We cannot agree to it.”

That said, there are other parties to this trial, which is to say, the state attorneys general. And they have not relented. New York AG Tish James said the deal “fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case, and would benefit Live Nation at the expense of consumers.” And they will continue litigating. James issued a list, which notably includes both red and blue states.

Joining Attorney General James in continuing the lawsuit against Live Nation are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia.

The states have asked for a mistrial, arguing that the settlement has “has materially and irreparably prejudiced the Plaintiff States before the currently empaneled jury, and materially altered the character of these proceedings, including by jeopardizing Plaintiff States’ access to experts, witnesses, trial exhibits, demonstratives and necessary support staff (including graphic designers, trial technicians, related personnel).”

The DOJ has carried the majority of the government’s litigation (including the states’). The DOJ currently has about 40 lawyers working round-the-clock on this case. The states do not. To run this trial on their own, they say, they would need to obtain large swaths of materials, transfer data bases and reallocate their own resources. There are also questions about whether the states could retain the same key experts expected to testify on behalf of the plaintiffs.

The judge didn’t buy this as reason enough to grant their request and was just as unhappy with them as he was with the other parties. The states knew, he said, that there was discussion of settlement, as early as January 29. Why weren’t they preparing? “Now you’re saying to the court we don’t like where we are and we want a redo,” he said.

Trump’s Department of Justice Doesn’t Want to Break Up Live Nation

The judge has dismissed the jury for a week, and will have the parties in tomorrow to talk about the motion for a mistrial, including the Acting Assistant Attorney General, Omeed Assefi, and the CEO of Live Nation, Michael Rapino.

It seems clear that the DOJ leaders aren’t conceding for strategic reasons, they just don’t want to break up the company. Here’s a quote by a top DOJ official given to Ben Remaly of the Global Competition Review. "If the concern is that Ticketmaster operates as a monopoly, how does the American consumer benefit from an existing monopoly being offloaded to a third party... probably private equity." My guess is that’s coming from outside of the Antitrust Division. And it shows how they can’t imagine a non-dysfunctional economic order.

More on this fiasco soon.

On Wednesday morning in courtroom 23B in the Southern District of New York, government lawyers read a text exchange between a Live Nation executive and the then-CEO of BSE Global, the company that owns the Barclays Center.

The text was sent by Live Nation VP Patti Kim to John Abbamondi, her friend, who, at the time, was considering replacing Ticketmaster as Barclays Center ticketing provider. Apparently, word had gotten out that Barclays was going to pick SeatGeek over Ticketmaster.

April 9, 2021, 10:55 p.m.: “Anyways should think about bigger relationship with Live Nation not just who is writing a bigger check (winky emoji),” Kim texted.

Abbamondi said he viewed the message as a warning from a friend about what could happen if Barclays left Ticketmaster.

At the time, the arena’s long-standing exclusive ticketing agreement with Ticketmaster was nearing its end, though the status of that contract was itself disputed. Abbamondi, who became CEO in 2020, said that one of his priorities after arriving was to negotiate a better deal.

SeatGeek, a rival ticketing service, had offered an attractive proposal. Abbamondi felt the pricing and technology were superior. Like any decision, it involved risks. The biggest, though, had little to do with either ticketing service.

Instead, he said, “The biggest risk was that Live Nation might retaliate against us and withhold events.”

While Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, they are supposed to operate in different lanes: Ticketmaster is a ticketing service contracted by venues, while Live Nation runs tours and artist performances. The government alleges that the joint company – made up of America’s largest promoter and ticketing platform – threatens and retaliates against venues that want to choose different ticketing services.

Wednesday’s testimony focused on these alleged threats and retaliation.

Not long after receiving the text message from Kim, Abbamondi said he called Live Nation to inform them that Barclays had decided to go with SeatGeek. At the end of the call, part of which was played in the courtroom yesterday, an irate sounding Michael Rapino (CEO of Live Nation) told Abbamondi that it was going to be tough to continue delivering concerts to the venue.

Sitting in the witness box in a navy suit with a neatly folded pocket square, Abbamondi said he interpreted the remark as “a veiled threat, maybe not so veiled.”

Allegations of Retaliation

Following the decision to leave Ticketmaster, Abbamondi said that Live Nation retaliated against Barclays. Despite an existing agreement for Live Nation to schedule a certain number of shows at Barclays, that year saw far fewer than previous years. Other promoters with these sorts of agreements, by contrast, did not substantially reduce the number of events they booked at the venue.

The “smoking gun,” Abbamondi said, came when Billie Eilish skipped Barclays during her 2022 tour. In 2020, Eilish was scheduled to play at both Barclays and Madison Square Garden, but these shows were canceled due to the eruption of the pandemic. Abbamondi said canceled shows are typically rescheduled at the same venue. When this tour was rescheduled, though, Barclays was skipped over. Eilish returned to Madison Square Garden and performed at the UBS arena instead of Barclays. Abbamondi said Live Nation told him this was Eilish’s choice, though one of Eilish’s managers reportedly said Live Nation had made the decision. The latter statement was objected to and excluded as hearsay.

The defense pointed out that the UBS arena was a fierce new competitor, and Barclays was internally aware that it could drive away business. The arena hadn’t even been built during Eilish’s first tour. Rapino’s statement, the defense suggested, was in reference to the increased difficulty to book as a result of this competition.

Minnesota Wild

Another witness described why some venues ultimately decide not to risk leaving Ticketmaster at all.

Mitch Helgerson, chief revenue officer of the Minnesota Wild hockey team, whose arena hosts a mix of sporting events and concerts, testified that in 2018 and 2019 his organization also considered switching its primary ticketing service from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek. At the time, SeatGeek was a new and relatively inexperienced primary ticketing service, but it came to the table with an advantageous offer, including $1 million more annually than Ticketmaster had offered, and Helgerson was interested.

In Helgerson’s first renegotiation meeting with Ticketmaster, he said they leveled “a credible threat” for what would happen if the venue left Ticketmaster.

The executives with whom he spoke allegedly said that if the venue chose another primary ticketing service, “Live Nation could move all their shows” to a competitor venue. That, Helgerson said, “would be almost catastrophic to our organization.”

Live Nation Retaliation Insurance

To ease the venue’s fears of Live Nation retaliation, SeatGeek came back with a proposal: “Live Nation Retaliation Insurance.”

SeatGeek agreed to pay the venue for any concert played at a rival arena on a day it had available. The idea was that if Live Nation retaliated, the venue would not lose cash. Ultimately, Helgerson said, “it would help, but it wouldn’t be enough,” as concerts provide value aside from cash.

After another alleged threat in 2019, Helgerson said he had pretty much made up his mind: The venue could not leave Ticketmaster. The two still have an exclusive agreement today.

It’s hard to know if the arena would have chosen SeatGeek had these alleged threats not been lobbed. Helgerson acknowledged that Ticketmaster was known, trusted, safe and dependable. SeatGeek did not yet have a record.

Barclays eventually went back to Ticketmaster in 2023. Abbamondi, who pushed for the SeatGeek contract, was let go less than two years after becoming CEO.

At the end of the day in court, the lawyers on both sides hammered out an agreement on an important matter, something of a rarity in this case. They will start providing lunch to the jury. Impressively, the jury has remained engaged throughout the trial thus far. No one has fallen asleep yet (except for the marshal in the overflow room yesterday, whose snoring unfortunately alerted the whole room).