For years, the sudden collapse of the Barclays Center’s deal with SeatGeek in 2023 looked like a textbook case of Live Nation muscle. It wasn’t. Newly released emails in the Live Nation antitrust trial now being litigated by more than 20 state attorneys general show the arena pulled the plug after SeatGeek allowed brokers to list speculative Bruce Springsteen tickets before any seats had actually gone on sale.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice had hinted that the Brooklyn arena ended its deal due to pressure from Live Nation after arena officials opted to switch from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek in 2020. DOJ lawyers even introduced a transcript of a call between former Barclays Center CEO John Abbamondi and Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino that they suggested showed the Live Nation boss threatening to punish the arena for choosing SeatGeek.

It turns out that the Barclays Center terminated its deal with SeatGeek two years into the agreement after the company was caught allowing brokers to list speculative Bruce Springsteen tickets on its site for the Barclays Center before any tickets had actually gone on sale.

“Frankly, this has gone too far and has caused irreparable damage to our business,” Laurie Jacoby, EVP at Barclays Center, wrote in a July 13 email to SeatGeek CEO Jack Groetzinger.

Download the July 13 email from Laurie Jacoby to Jack Groetzinger below.

Speculative tickets are a major scourge of the concert business—they are essentially listings by ticket brokers for tickets they do not currently possess on sites like StubHub and SeatGeek. Brokers list the tickets, often days or weeks before they go on sale, and plan to procure them only after a customer agrees to buy. They’re a major headache for promoters, artists, and ticketing companies because they confuse consumers and add to the perception that insiders are rigging the system against everyday fans.

Allowing brokers to list speculative tickets on the Barclays Center’s ticketing page—when tickets hadn’t yet gone on sale—would be a major violation for most ticketing companies and underscores the challenges the arena faced working with a platform like SeatGeek to provide both primary and secondary ticket sales.

In her letter, Jacoby told Groetzinger that the incident could have cost the building the concert (it didn’t) and warned that “word on the street is that promoters don’t want to come to Barclays Center due to the issues we’ve had with SeatGeek, and we place responsibility for this entirely on your shoulders.”

Nine days after Jacoby emailed Groetzinger, the arena’s general counsel, Jeff Gerwitz, emailed SeatGeek’s Adam Lichstein ahead of a planned meeting with Barclays Center’s new CEO, Sam Zussman, outlining “shortfalls under our Ticketing Agreement which we understand SeatGeek has yet to remedy.”

Those shortfalls included complaints that “SeatGeek has failed to competently execute on-sales” and has been “too slow in moving buyers to event pages from the waiting room.” Gerwitz also complained that SeatGeek “lacks the ability to expand the event manifest in a reasonable amount of time” when there are changes to seating configurations on the day of an event.

Download the July 13 email from Jeff Gerwitz below.

What follows in Gerwitz’s email are ten pages of detailed complaints about the problems Barclays Center had with SeatGeek after switching to the platform in 2021, including a list of shows that were negatively impacted. The list begins with a New Year’s Eve Strokes concert that included “issues with aisle and VIP seats not functioning during the pre-sale” and “six months of constant complaints by agent, manager, and promoter LN.” The document adds that extra “money [was] also given to the artist due to perceived overall loss of revenue.”

Attorneys for the DOJ and the states have made a big deal of the fact that the number of Live Nation shows at the building dropped from 22 annually to nine, but the letter details numerous problems with ticket sales for Live Nation events, including a Slipknot concert where VIP packages were not available for several hours after the on-sale began, and a Chris Rock and Kevin Hart show where reporting functions went down, leading to a “huge potential loss of revenue.”

Eventually, the Barclays Center dropped SeatGeek and switched back to Ticketmaster, beginning in early 2023.

The Barclays Center has played a key role in the DOJ’s antitrust case against Live Nation. The trial opened with testimony from former CEO John Abbamondi about a phone call he had with Michael Rapino in 2021 regarding the switch from SeatGeek to Ticketmaster. A secret recording of that call was played in court during Rapino’s testimony.