The federal government's landmark antitrust trial against the world's largest live entertainment company reached a pivotal moment this week with Live Nation's lawyers asking the trial judge to throw out the entire case before it ever reaches a jury.

On March 31, 2026, attorneys from Latham & Watkins and Cravath, Swaine & Moore filed a nine-page motion for "judgment as a matter of law" with Judge Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York. The motion from Live Nation and Ticketmaster's argues that the judge should end the trial now because the government has put on such a weak case that no reasonable jury could ever rule against them.

As one legal source tells Decibel, “the fact that this motion was filed after the government's presentation of evidence shows that the defense believes the prosecution has come up short. Badly short.”

The case against Live Nation, by any measure, has always been ambitious. The government's theory is that Live Nation has used its dominant position across concert promotion, venue ownership and ticketing to crush competition and harm consumers. Live Nation controls a staggering portion of the American concert experience: it promotes the biggest tours, manages many of the most prominent artists, operates a vast network of amphitheaters, and — through Ticketmaster — processes the tickets for a huge share of major live events. The government's case is that this vertical integration isn't just big business; it's an illegal stranglehold.

The defendants see things very differently.

"The evidence does not permit any reasonable jury to find that Ticketmaster had power over price, control over output, the ability to exclude competition, or any other indicia of monopoly power," the motion written by Live Nation attorney Andrew M. Gass writes.

At the heart of antitrust law is a deceptively simple question: what market are we actually talking about? One can't prove a company has a monopoly without first defining the arena in which it competes. Get the market definition wrong, and the whole case falls apart.

The government drew its market narrowly, focusing on "primary ticketing services to major concert venues" — specifically, 257 large venues it designated as a distinct category. Live Nation's lawyers are arguing this is a made-up sandbox designed purely to make Ticketmaster look dominant. That’s because ticketing contracts cover all events at a venue — sports, family shows, concerts — not just concerts. Isolating "concert" ticketing artificially inflates Ticketmaster's apparent market share, according to the defense.

The defense also attacks the selection of those 257 "major" venues, noting the government presented no evidence that these venues are treated differently from other large stadiums and arenas in any commercially meaningful way. Under antitrust law, a market can't be carved out of thin air — it needs to reflect real economic distinctions.

Even if the market definition were accepted, Live Nation argues the government failed to prove Ticketmaster actually holds monopoly power within it. This is where the filing gets particularly pointed.

Monopoly power in antitrust law typically means the ability to control prices, restrict output, or exclude rivals. The defense says the government's own expert economistDr. Hill, had access to all the pricing data — and produced no analysis showing Ticketmaster ever raised prices above competitive levels. More than that, the filing claims the record actually shows Ticketmaster's share of ticketing contract revenues has been declining over time.

The defense goes further, arguing that Ticketmaster faces more competitive pressure today than it did 15 years ago — pointing to rivals like SeatGeek and AXS as evidence that competition is alive and functioning in this market. That's a difficult narrative for the government to overcome if it holds up.

The government's case rests on several theories of illegal conduct. The defense takes them on one by one.

On threats and retaliation — the claim that Ticketmaster and Live Nation punished venues for using rival ticketing companies — the defense argues the evidence amounts to a handful of isolated incidents spread across a 15-year period involving thousands of venue negotiations. That's not a pattern of anticompetitive behavior, they say; it's noise.

Key defense point

Live Nation does thousands of shows in venues that don't use Ticketmaster. This, the defense argues, directly undercuts the government's claim that Live Nation systematically "conditions" concert bookings on venues adopting Ticketmaster.

On exclusive dealing — long-term contracts that lock venues into using Ticketmaster — the defense notes something striking: venues actually prefer exclusive contracts. They're more efficient and allow venues to extract better terms for their ticketing rights. When the beneficiary of the allegedly exclusionary contract actually wants it, the legal case for harm becomes much harder to make.

On a deal with Oak View Group, a major venue management company, the defense says the arrangement simply paid OVG to advocate for Ticketmaster — while still allowing OVG venues to sign with competitors when rivals offered better terms. OVG venues did, in fact, sign with AXS after the deal was struck. Not exactly a textbook exclusionary conspiracy.

Separate from the ticketing arguments, the government also alleged that Live Nation illegally monopolized the market for large amphitheaters — venues like outdoor concert bowls — by acquiring control over a dominant share of them. The defense says this claim has multiple fatal flaws.

First, the market definition is again contested: artists routinely play arenas and other venues instead of amphitheaters, suggesting these aren't a genuinely distinct market. Second, for 10 of the 16 amphitheaters the government claims Live Nation "acquired," it actually only took over booking rights — a management function, not ownership. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the defense argues that Live Nation reached its allegedly dominant 70% share in large amphitheaters back in 2018 — outside the four-year statute of limitations. Cases can't be built on conduct that's too old to sue over.

A Rule 50(a) motion rarely succeeds. Judges are generally reluctant to take cases away from juries at the midpoint of trial, preferring to let the evidence play out fully. Judge Subramanian will almost certainly deny the motion and let the case proceed — at least through the defense's presentation of evidence. Live Nation's legal team explicitly reserves the right to renew the motion once all evidence is in.

But the filing still matters. It is a detailed roadmap of every gap the defense believes exists in the government's case — every expert opinion that wasn't rendered, every piece of data that wasn't analyzed, every market definition that wasn't rigorously supported. When this case eventually reaches a jury, or if it reaches an appellate court, these arguments will resurface.

The trial represents one of the most significant antitrust actions in the entertainment industry in decades. The outcome could reshape how concert tickets are sold, how tours are promoted, and whether the bundled power of Live Nation's empire constitutes an illegal monopoly or simply a very successful business. The answer, one way or another, is coming.