The Department of Justice’s lawsuit involving Ticketmaster and Live Nation seeks to dismantle the predatory concert monopoly.

The waters mixed. Thanks to the Taylor Swift ticket sales fiasco in late 2022, few companies have seen their predatory business practices brought into such stark light as those cast on Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. Swift fans spent several disastrous days trying to purchase tickets for the Eras Tour, and the relatively few who were successful ended up paying exorbitant, expensive fees. Then there was a congressional hearing. Senators from both parties gave Live Nation the Big Tobacco treatment. One of Ticketmaster’s biggest rivals ordered lawmakers to break up the giant.

We’ll never know whether Thursday’s 124-page Justice Department lawsuit against Live Nation, alleging all sorts of antitrust violations, would have happened now if it weren’t for Swift’s mess. We especially won’t know whether 30 state attorneys general, including a handful of Republicans, would have joined the lawsuit if countless pop music fans in their states hadn’t been whipped into a frenzy by a high-profile moment of ticket-selling incompetence. But one of the striking things about the lawsuit, which explicitly calls for the breakup of Live Nation and the separation of its Ticketmaster business from other lines of revenue, is that CTRL-Fing in the document says nothing about Taylor’s moment.

The feds’ case against Live Nation isn’t really about all the nonsense that Ticketmaster puts fans through when they want to go to a concert. To be clear, it does lots of time for this. However, this lawsuit is part of the Justice Department’s recent tradition of not only prosecuting anticompetitive companies but doing so on behalf of a much broader group of stakeholders than just consumers. The message of the lawsuit is that yes, music fans are getting a bad deal due to Ticketmaster’s dominance of the ticketing market, but Live Nation’s most corrosive impact is on the events world as a whole, poisoning not only fans but venues and artists and promoters too. The only remedy, according to the feds, is to stop allowing Live Nation to serve as multiple things at once.

The history of U.S. antitrust laws is long, but it’s safe to say that antitrust laws have traditionally been used to protect “consumers, taxpayers and workers.” Don’t take my word for it, but consider the words of the Department of Justice, which describes the effects of antitrust law in exactly this way. The government does not want companies to be isolated from competition, whether through collusion to keep prices high or wages low. Americans are getting more innovative products for less money. Employees earn better. That’s what this is all about and what is the combined effect of the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, the two biggest players in this field.

Over the past few years, the Biden administration has tried to take a more expansive approach, and not least by appointing an antitrust hawk to lead the Federal Trade Commission. In 2021 and 2022, the Department of Justice managed to block the takeover of publishing giant Simon & Schuster by another giant, Penguin Random House. Book publishing used to have a Big Six, but consolidation has made it a Big Five, and a recent transaction has made it a Big Four. The Department of Justice actually believed the deal was bad for consumers, who could get a fewer variety of books and pay more for them. But perhaps the sharpest focus in this case is on the impact of consolidation authorial, who were at risk of losing one of the few publishers who could pay them for their work. (In an awkward victory that had consequences, Simon & Schuster turned to a private equity firm.) The case involved not the publishers’ employees or book buyers, but another supplier in the supply chain, perhaps the most important one: the people who actually write the books.

The Live Nation lawsuit continues this approach. The feds lament that Ticketmaster, by far the largest concert ticket player, charges concertgoers costs that “far exceed fees in comparable parts of the world.” But the lawsuit is really about the ecosystem, how Live Nation’s control over the ticketing giant contributes to its control over venues and event promotion and worsens the overall enterprise. Artists have less freedom to promote their work as they see fit and perform in ideal venues. Promoters miss out on many benefits if they do not follow Live Nation’s rules. And concert halls are at risk of not getting good performances if they don’t operate under a ticketing system that (on the one hand) sucks and (on the other hand) may not allow them to maximize their revenues and customer satisfaction.

Start where all music begins: with the artist. The federal complaint spends a lot of time on the relationship between Live Nation and potential competitor-turned-partner Oak View Group. In particular, the lawsuit mentions correspondence between the management of both companies, from which Live Nation learns that Oak View Group is applying to be the organizer of the artist’s concert tour, which Living Nation I would rather promote. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino emails Oak View Group CEO and states that it would be “stupid” to “play into” an artist’s agent by allowing companies to compete with each other to promote the tour. Oak View’s CEO agrees and literally writes, “I never want to be a competitor.” Therefore, the artist receives worse offers from potential promoters who organize the logistics of the performance and help sell it to the public.

But that works well for Oak View, which can host events at its properties featuring artists under a promotional deal with Live Nation. The feds say Oak View Group described itself as a “hammer” and “pimp” to protect Live Nation’s interests even though it has a competitive position.

Meanwhile, Live Nation has plenty of music venues and may deny access to those venues for artists who don’t use Live Nation as a promoter. The feds say Live Nation has a monopoly on large amphitheaters, controlling 40 of the 50 largest in the country. As the owner of the ideal type of venue for artists who are too big for a club but can’t fill an arena or NFL stadium, Live Nation has a lot of power over artists who want to play to growing audiences. In the lawsuit, Live Nation’s executive insists that employees should not increase promotional offers for artists in this segment knowing they have no other options. The complaint says artists sign long-term contracts with Live Nation to gain access to the amphitheater.

This happens in venues owned by Live Nation. Elsewhere, the lawsuit describes Live Nation’s routine practice of requiring venues to use Ticketmaster as its ticketing service to obtain Live Nation performances. Rapino’s CEO described this dynamic in shockingly mob-like terms, which the Justice Department cited in the lawsuit. rapino, publicly, admitted he was unable to explicitly ban Live Nation from venues that don’t want to use Ticketmaster, but then said: “We have to put the show where we make the most money, and maybe that venue won’t be the best, it’s no longer an economic venue, because we are not maintaining revenue.” Therefore, a venue that chooses not to use Ticketmaster may have no tickets to sell at all – at least not for a front-line band that is part of the Live Nation portfolio.

Non-Live Nation promoters are in hell too. The complaint describes the person who organized the concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum and outsourced ticket sales to StubHub, not Ticketmaster. The lawsuit alleges that Ticketmaster, citing exclusive rights to sell concert tickets at the Coliseum, “threatened to deny admission to any fan using a ticket issued by StubHub.” StubHub has stopped selling tickets to the event, and the Department of Justice says “hundreds” of customers with StubHub tickets were unable to get into the concert.

It’s all pretty rotten. This should not be allowed and the official position of the United States is that it is is not allowed and Live Nation should be broken up. (The company’s promotional business is much larger than ticket sales, generating approximately six times more revenue for a total of $22 billion in 2022). Live Nation’s dominance is bad for ticket buyers, but the lawsuit makes clear it’s bad for many other parties involved in putting on the concert. And it starts, like everything in music, with the artist.

The federal government is currently filing similar cases against Amazon (via the FTC) and Apple (Department of Justice), accusing each of abusing its dominant position in some areas to intimidate competitors in others. The government has many potential targets if it wants to increase the number of such cases. The most Live Nation-like target may be Fanatics, the sporting goods retailer whose occasionally shoddy merchandise, quality control and customer service have made it one of the most despised brands in sports. But Fanatics’ biggest problem isn’t the crappy Major League Baseball uniforms the team collaborated with Nike on. In this way, Fanatics has amassed market power to penetrate multiple sectors of the sports industry, from trading cards to licensing to retail. The real story isn’t about bad T-shirts, it’s about corporate power, it’s just that Ticketmaster’s biggest problem wasn’t all those Taylor Swifts tickets.