After years of accusations that Live Nation and Ticketmaster operated an illegal monopoly in the concert ticketing industry, a New York jury found the company liable on all of the monopoly claims against it.
A judge will now decide the penalties the company must face — Live Nation officials are hoping to convince the judge that the settlement it reached with the DOJ last month is strong enough to address the claims against it. Opponents of the company will call for more drastic remedies including the breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
According to media reports, the nine-person federal jury in the case found that Live Nation — the parent company of Ticketmaster — illegally monopolized the live entertainment industry, handing a landmark victory to 34 states that spent seven weeks in a New York courtroom making that case.
At the center of the trial was a pattern the government called a threat: sign with Ticketmaster, or lose access to Live Nation's biggest concert tours. Venues that pushed back, like Brooklyn's Barclays Center when it briefly switched to upstart rival SeatGeek, claimed they felt the consequences immediately.
Then there were the internal Slack messages — the kind that tend to look terrible in a courtroom. Two Ticketmaster employees bragged about overcharging fans on parking and VIP upgrades. One wrote that he was "robbing them blind baby." One of those employees is now a senior executive at Live Nation. He apologized on the stand and said he hadn't been following company policy.
Fan satisfaction with Ticketmaster, meanwhile, cratered from 18 percent in 2021 to just 1 percent in 2023, according to the company's own internal data. Live Nation said it was simply part of an effort to track and improve customer service. Hard to spin.
The trial took a dramatic turn about a week in, when the Justice Department — now operating under the Trump administration, which has generally preferred settlements over courtroom battles — quietly cut a deal with Live Nation and dropped out of the case entirely. The judge was furious when he found out the DOJ had delayed disclosing the agreement, calling the move "mind-boggling." Most states rejected the settlement terms and kept going anyway, bringing in a new antitrust lawyer with just days to prepare.
Judge Arun Subramanian will hold a separate proceeding to decide what Live Nation has to do as a remedy. The original ask from the government was a full breakup — splitting Ticketmaster away from Live Nation entirely. Whether that happens is still very much an open question, but any significant divestment would reshape how concerts are promoted, ticketed, and sold for years to come.
Live Nation will also owe money. The jury found Ticketmaster overcharged consumers $1.72 per ticket — and the judge will set a final damages figure from there across hundreds of millions of transactions.
