Day 9: When Live Nation Stops Being Polite...
Ticketmaster execs said to one witness that we do not “work cooperatively to help make the Nets/Barclays lots of live event money while losing money on the ticketing side.”
The courtroom gallery has finally thinned out as the Live Nation trial has moved into the details of the joint-company’s alleged monopolistic business practices. Wednesday’s proceedings focused on the extent to which Ticketmaster uses Live Nation as leverage in ticketing negotiations, and executives were questioned about a myriad of internal emails.
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 ticket. 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.