Attorneys for Live Nation have come up with a fairly succinct retort to monopoly claims by state attorneys general — Ticketmaster dominates the arena and stadium space because its competitors simply aren’t very good.

SeatGeek’s problems have already been documented in Brooklyn at the Barclays Center — in 2021, arena officials caught scalpers selling speculative tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert before they even went on sale, and building executives had compiled a ten-page list of bugs, outages, and broken functionality that often hurt ticket sales.

This week, lawyers for Live Nation entered a number of damaging letters and emails into evidence it had collected about AXS, AEG’s in-house ticketing system that was born of the 2010 consent decree negotiated by the Obama-era DOJ following the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. AXS was the brainchild of former AEG CEO Tim Leiweke, who was granted a license to use Ticketmaster’s backend software to create a Ticketmaster competitor. Instead, Leiweke would find himself fired by AEG in 2013, and AEG would partner with former Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen and Outbox Technology, a Montreal ticketing company with ties to Cirque du Soleil. That didn’t really work, so Outbox merged with Dan Gilbert’s company Veritix, which didn’t work great either. In 2019, AEG bought out Gilbert, Outbox, and TPG and has struggled to overhaul the company.

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“There is major frustration with AXS service company-wide,” Rick Mueller wrote to AXS CEO Bryan Perez in 2019 in one of a dozen emails introduced as evidence by Live Nation (read it here) as it prepares to present its side in USA vs. Live Nation, the sprawling DOJ case brought by the Department of Justice’s antitrust division in 2024 and now being litigated by attorney Jeffrey Kessler in a Manhattan courtroom on behalf of 30 states’ attorneys general.

While Kessler has brought a complex, multifaceted antitrust case against Live Nation, showing it used different incentives and industry partners to entrench and reinforce its ticketing business and flywheel model across North America, attorneys for Live Nation are responding with a straightforward rebuttal: Ticketmaster dominates the concert and sports business because it offers a superior technology product to its top competitor, AXS, which has been forced upon AEG promoters for the last decade, much to their dissatisfaction.

“Right now, I feel secure in stating The Bowery Presents has a lack of confidence in the product provided by AXS,” The Bowery Presents’ Derek Tucker wrote in the 2019 email referenced above, complaining of “numerous service interruptions, outages, and data feed failures in Q3 of 2019.”

Ticketmaster attorneys also shared a damning internal AXS report from 2019, titled AXS Ticketing Strategy (read it here), that admits “AXS Ticketing has not grown by winning third-party accounts successfully,” says “confidence in current management team is questionable,” and admits “market reputation is tarnished.” Interestingly, one of the three strategies the company considers pursuing in 2019 is to “sell AXS Ticketing” and “make an attractive deal with Ticketmaster for our venues, festivals, and tours.”

Company officials ultimately opted instead to invest in AXS, and privately, executives at the company have told Decibel that the ticketing platform has made significant improvements in the last five years.

Still, it struggles to effectively compete against Ticketmaster and instead has adopted a new strategy — lobbying Live Nation, its partner venues, and the Justice Department to allow AEG to use AXS at Ticketmaster-exclusive venues whenever AEG presents a concert at the facility. When the DOJ announced it had reached a settlement with Live Nation earlier this month, one of the conditions was that buildings could elect to sign a non-exclusive ticketing contract with Live Nation that would give the promoter more control over the ticketing company used to ticket the show.

AEG has also made a similar offer to Live Nation for its venues, like Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles, which can be ticketed by Ticketmaster for shows brought by the promoter.

Of course, not all AEG promoters necessarily want to use Ticketmaster.

“Even with all the pressure from AEG to go with AXS ticketing, I stay with TM,” promoter Louis Messina wrote in an email to Live Nation’s Bob Roux in 2024 (read it here). Messina is the tour promoter for Kenny Chesney, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour, which AEG fought hard to ticket, only to later admit it dodged a major bullet having Ticketmaster handle the ticket sale, which experienced outages due to sky-high demand.

“It’s a win for all of us.”