WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice is planning to sue Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, over an alleged monopoly over event tickets that has frustrated customers and artists alike for years, according to multiple reports.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the DOJ plan, which has not been publicly confirmed.
The reports of an impending lawsuit aren't out of the blue. They come after years of investigation by federal regulators and a series of high-profile ticket snafus, including problems with Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny and Drake concert tickets.
Ticketmaster is the largest ticket seller in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world; the company has partnerships with major concert venues and artists such as Taylor Swift, as well as contracts with the NFL, NBA and NHL to exclusively provide tickets to league games.
The justice department is reportedly preparing to file suit on anti-trust grounds, according to Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, who cited multiple people briefed on the situation, alleging that Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been sitting atop a monopoly preventing venues from using other ticketing platforms to sell seats.
The exact details of the lawsuit were not publicly disclosed, but sources told the Wall Street Journal that the case would be filed "in the coming weeks."
Live Nation’s head of Corporate Affairs, Dan Wall, penned a blog post in March pushing back against accusations that Ticketmaster was artificially raising prices for event seats. Instead, he argued, the high prices come from artists choosing their ticket prices and venues charging service fees on top of the ticket cost.
"For a small percentage of concerts — the high-profile ones — consumer demand greatly exceeds the supply of available tickets," Walls wrote. "For the top 5-10% of touring artists, demand is regularly well in excess of the supply of tickets. We are fortunate that artists in this category choose not to exercise their full pricing power; otherwise, they would charge the much higher prices we see on resale markets."
Ticketmaster has received intense scrutiny in recent years, even drawing the ire of lawmakers after ticket sales for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour broke down in 2022, leaving many fans unable to purchase seats legitimately.
Live Nation is the parent company behind Ticketmaster. They acquired the near-ubiquitous event platform in 2010, in a merger that the federal government allowed with the legal caveat, enforced through a consent decree, that the company couldn't pressure concert venues to use its ticketing software for 10 years.
In 2020, the DOJ extended the consent decree by another five years to 2025 after finding that Ticketmaster was retaliating against venues that didn't use their platform.