Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

smartbit

Alternative sources - https://apnews.com/article/live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrus... - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an... or https://archive.is/KA1wV Background story by Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-tic... (April 13, 2026)

hackingonempty

from the NYT: > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket. I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.

dmitrygr

> The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket. I think the decimal point is a few digits too many to the left here... The various "fees" routinely add up to hundreds

codeugo

There has been a bunch of reporting on this over the past couple years but will this even effect them?

rossdavidh

In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.

jazzpush2

Now do service fees and 'convenience' fees. Every ticket I buy for a movie somehow costs $2 extra now. (As with everything else). Robbery.

dataviz1000

The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.

jp57

The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better. I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.

kumarski

Venue contracts are a sort of political firewall against any relevant ticketing technology becoming massive globally. Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.

2OEH8eoCRo0

Concert seats should be handled the same as airline seats. I can buy the same airline seat from dozens of different places online. Why is that?

cdrnsf

Do not pass go, do not collect $200. They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.

HardwareLust

Cool, can't wait for the slap on the wrist and a $4 coupon we'll get in 2031.

efitz

https://archive.ph/dfZVv

josefritzishere

This is very fork-found-in-kitchen.

sonofhans

I feel like we had a golden opportunity, years ago, to do something about Ticketmaster. In 1994 Pearl Jam, one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, boycotted and sued Ticketmaster. I wished at the time more bands had stood up and said, “Enough.” It would have worked. But it’s easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like they’re locked into a contract, and fame is such a precipice. I suppose that makes it hard for them to work together for their own good. Ironically sometimes artists complain about Ticketmaster and their stranglehold, but again, it takes some special bravery to actually do something about it.

tgsovlerkhgsel

Great, so now they will have to repay the illegal profits and get some measures forced onto them to bring the inflated ticket prices back down, right? Right? Guys?

VerifiedReports

"The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket." Absolute horseshit. They were screwing consumers for more than that since the '80s. Over the last 20 years? It's 10 or 20 times that. WTF.

onpointed

A monopoly with competition: "Shares of rival ticket brokers jumped on the news, with StubHub Holding Inc. climbing as much as 5% and Vivid Seats Inc. rising as much as 9.1%."

throw0101d

I remember Pearl Jam challenging them in the 1990s: * https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki... > In May 1994, the grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Ticketmaster had cut the group out of venue bookings in a dispute over fees.[50] The investigation was closed without action in 1995, though the Justice Department stated it would continue to monitor the developments in the ticket industry.[51][52] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster#Anti-competition_... > By 1994, Pearl Jam was "fighting on all fronts" as its manager described the band at the time.[43] Reporter Chuck Philips broke a series of stories showing that Ticketmaster was gouging Pearl Jam's customers.[44] Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. […] > The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994, in Washington, D.C.[52] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Jam#Vs.,_Vitalogy_and_de...

andirk

Someone tell Pearl Jam's Eddy Vedder his work to fight Ticketmaster some 30 years ago finally came to a head today. > Ticketmaster sells about 10 times as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG. Yeah, that's called a monopoly, even if it wasn't Ticketmaster's intention, which of course it was.