Anger. That’s been the most frequent and obvious reaction to the Justice Department’s baffling and embarrassing decision this week to settle its monopoly lawsuit against Live Nation. After years of evidence that Live Nation, the largest artist manager and concert promoter in America, in coordination with its in-house event-ticketing monopoly Ticketmaster, consistently ripped off fans and bullied venues and artists, the government’s case had finally made it to trial—only to end a week after it began. How could a company that has so blatantly abused its outright power in the live music industry for so many years, earning scorn from artists, independent venues owners, and consumer advocates, get off with the most cursory slap on the wrist?
The settlement has been messy at the least. The Department of Justice (DOJ) settled the lawsuit without informing either the judge or its lead litigator on the case—a decision Judge Arun Subramanian said showed “absolute disrespect for the court.” The settlement came just weeks after Trump-affiliated lobbyists forced the former head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Gail Slater, out of her job, and after those same lobbyists spent many months working to convince top Department officials to settle the Live Nation lawsuit before a jury could decide the company’s fate. It was easy to predict how this lawsuit would turn out.
But amid the Trump administration’s observable corruption and Keystone-cops level of stumbling over itself to get this settlement done, it’s worth thinking about why this particular kind of settlement rarely works, and why breaking up monopolies like Live Nation is the better, and often only, solution to the core problems of monopoly power.
Under the settlement, Ticketmaster will cap some of its notoriously high fees at amphitheaters and open its platform to third-party ticket resellers like Stubhub and SeatGeek. Live Nation, meanwhile, will allow venues that contract with the company to use ticketing services other than Ticketmaster for a percentage of their events, and will limit exclusive contracts between venues and Live Nation to four years. Live Nation will also sell off around a dozen of the 400-plus venues it owns, and pay $280 million to the Plaintiff States.
The settlement is getting poor reviews
Those with a dog in the fight against Live Nation and Ticketmaster aren’t happy with the deal. Stephen Parker, head of the National Independent Venue Association, rightly points out that the reported $280 million Live Nation will pay out to the States is a fraction of what the live music monopoly rakes in from concert goers and venues over a year. The payout, Parker says, “is the equivalent of 4 days of their 2025 revenue, which means they could potentially make it back by this Friday.” Meanwhile, the settlement’s requirement that Ticketmaster host rival platforms could empower scalpers and secondary ticketing sites, “which would likely exacerbate the price gouging potential for predatory resellers and the platforms that serve them,” Parker says.
United Musicians and Allied Workers and The National Consumers League also objected to the deal. “Allowing Live Nation to keep Ticketmaster without meaningful structural remedies would squander a rare opportunity to restore competition to the live entertainment marketplace,” National Consumers League executive John Breyault says in a statement.
The settlement likely won’t work, not just because it’s barely a slap on the wrist for the most powerful company in live music history. It won’t work because settlements like this almost never work — and the government surely knows it.
A history of failed behavioral remedies
There’s maybe no better example of a failed conduct remedy than what the government required in the original Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger 15 years ago. In 2010, antitrust enforcers from the Obama administration ignored the chorus of music industry and consumer critics warning about the unchecked power of a merged Ticketmaster and Live Nation. They approved the deal over these objections, subject to some promises that the combined company wouldn’t force venues to use Ticketmaster in order to host Live Nation artists and tours (or what antitrust recognizes as a “tie-in”). Eight years later, Live Nation was found to have violated that remedy so flagrantly that even the first Trump administration was forced to take action. But rather than sue the company to break it up, they made Live Nation double-promise that it wouldn’t abuse its monopoly again.
Nothing changed. According to sworn testimony at trial, Live Nation in 2021 threatened the Barclays Center, a major live event venue opened in 2012 and home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, with withholding major concerts and tours after the venue ditched Ticketmaster for a different ticketing platform. The testimony, from former Barclays Center head John Abbamondi, described exactly the kind of monopoly conduct critics feared when the companies merged, and that the DOJ banned for a second time just one year before Abbamondi got his first “offer you can’t refuse” call from Live Nation. The conduct remedy failed, and then failed again. A few years later, Jonathan Kanter and the Biden DOJ had seen enough, and sued to break up the company.
This settlement appears destined to fail as well, for the reasons conduct remedies often do. The proposed behavioral fixes to Live Nation’s monopoly power do nothing to address the structure of the company, which is the thing that gives it the power and motivation to dominate every corner of the live music industry. So long as Live Nation controls Ticketmaster, it will want to compel the many hundreds of major artists it manages and the tours it organizes to use Ticketmaster. The milquetoast guardrails the settlement creates around venue and artist choice in ticketing platforms do nothing to change the interrelated nature of Live Nation’s business.
That’s why conduct remedies in monopoly cases are exceedingly difficult to enforce. Stopping a monopoly from doing monopoly things is expensive and time-consuming for everyone involved — enforcers, the courts, and the company itself. There’s the inherent information asymmetry between the monopoly and the government, forcing the government to assign a team of people to monitor the company, and use subpoena power when necessary, to essentially litigate the remedy for years until the settlement’s rules expire, after which the company can again abuse its monopoly and wait for enforcers to catch on.
As antitrust scholars John Kwoka and Spencer Weber-Waller point out, conduct remedies directly conflict with a monopoly’s very nature. If abusing power benefits a company’s bottom line, as it does Live Nation’s, the company is going to do whatever it can to work around the settlement’s rules to continue that abuse, either in full or some reduced version of it. Conduct remedies force the government to fight against nature itself.
Breakups strike directly at the heart of monopoly power. If Live Nation no longer owns Ticketmaster, it has no ability or reason to force venues and artists to use it. Its ability to tie a ticketing platform to popular artists and tours ends then and there. There’s no court-appointed monitor necessary, no compliance program needed. Breakups are effective, direct, and permanent.
The government’s failure to end Live Nation’s monopoly structure has animated critics of the settlement, and forced states to continue to litigate. “We will keep fighting this case without the federal government so that we can secure justice for all those harmed by Live Nation’s monopoly,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in the wake of the settlement news.
DOJ’s settlement with Live Nation, presumably at the behest of White House operatives, is more like a presidential pardon than something that will make live music competitive again. The government is asking a serial monopolist to play nice when it has never played nice before, then assigning a monitor, perpetually in the dark about what Live Nation is actually doing, to enforce the deal. Even if Live Nation fully abides by the settlement’s rules, in eight years everything goes back to the way it was. The settlement offers no solution and no relief.
Now, it will be up to state enforcers to demand a breakup, which is the only remedy that can, once and for all, end Live Nation’s monopoly abuse. Artists and venues are counting on the states’ success.