It may have taken roughly three decades, a spectacular Taylor Swift-related meltdown, a bipartisan Senate hearing, and the combined legal firepower of the Department of Justice and 39 state attorneys general, but the federal antitrust trial against Live Nation Entertainment (Ticketmaster’s parent company and the concert industry’s final boss) is finally happening. Opening statements began Tuesday in a Manhattan courtroom, and if the first few days of testimony are any indication, Live Nation’s legal team is in for a long six weeks.
The case, filed by the DOJ in 2024, accuses Live Nation of running its interconnected empire of concert promotion, venue ownership, artist management, and ticketing services as, essentially, a closed loop designed to ensure that no matter where an artist plays, how a venue sells its tickets, or what a fan pays at checkout, Live Nation gets its massive cut. Ticketmaster handles ticketing at somewhere between 80 and 86 percent of major concert venues in the country, depending on whose math you trust. Live Nation manages upwards of 400 artists, owns or controls more than 265 venues across North America, and reported $25.2 billion in revenue off 159 million ticket sales in 2025. The government wants the two companies split apart—Ticketmaster sold off, the cozy arrangements with venue partner Oak View Group dissolved—so the market can, for the first time in a generation, actually function like one.
“Today, the concert ticket industry is broken. In fact, the concert industry itself is broken,” DOJ attorney David Dahlquist told jurors. “It is controlled by a monopolist. It is controlled by Live Nation.” David Marriott, Live Nation’s lawyer, offered a rather different reading of the situation: “We’ll let the numbers do the talking. We do not have monopoly power.” He went on to insist that “Live Nation and Ticketmaster are all about bringing joy to people’s lives,” because nothing says joy like $473 in service fees.
Ticketmaster has been the subject of artist and fan rage for almost as long as it’s existed—Pearl Jam boycotted the company thirty years ago, lost nearly $3 million trying to tour without it, and testified before Congress, only for the DOJ to drop the matter a year later. When Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged in 2010, the DOJ approved the deal on the condition that Live Nation wouldn’t retaliate against venues that chose competing ticketing platforms; by 2019, the department found Live Nation had been doing exactly that, extended the consent decree with a $1 million penalty per violation, and then let the whole thing expire at the end of 2025. A real masterclass in enforcement, that. But the catalyst for the current lawsuit was the Swifties: in late 2022, Ticketmaster’s platform collapsed under presale demand for the Eras Tour, locking millions of fans out, prompting Swift herself to call the ordeal “excruciating,” and triggering the kind of bipartisan fury that only materializes when you manage to inconvenience tens of millions of people—and not just any people; Swifties—simultaneously. The DOJ used the momentum to file suit in 2024, with then-Attorney General Merrick Garland declaring it was “time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
The case has already been narrowed somewhat: in a pre-trial ruling, Judge Arun Subramanian dismissed the claims that Live Nation holds a monopoly over concert promotion specifically and that its practices have directly driven up ticket prices. But the two surviving claims are the ones with teeth. The first is that Live Nation illegally “ties” access to its amphitheaters to its promotion services—play a Live Nation venue, use a Live Nation promoter. The second is that Live Nation strong-arms venues into long-term exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster by threatening to route lucrative tours elsewhere. The testimony so far has been squarely aimed at proving the second one true.
The government’s first witness was John Abbamondi, former CEO of BSE Global, the company that operates Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. In 2021, after evaluating proposals from Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, and AXS, Barclays went with SeatGeek. Abbamondi’s reasoning was straightforward: Ticketmaster’s offer, in his words, was “nowhere near as good as the other two,” and SeatGeek’s technology was superior. (This tracks with Dahlquist’s opening-statement claim that Ticketmaster’s “technology is held together by duct tape.”) But the decision to leave did not go unacknowledged. Before the switch, Abbamondi’s friend Patti Kim, a Live Nation VP, texted him to “think about the bigger relationship” with Live Nation—punctuated by a winky face emoji he told the jury he interpreted as “a friendly warning that I was about to make a big mistake.” When he called Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino to deliver the news, a recording played for the jury captured Rapino dropping an F-bomb, referencing the soon-to-open UBS Arena, and levying what Abbamondi characterized as a “not-so-veiled” threat: leave Ticketmaster, and the concerts go elsewhere.
According to Abbamondi, that’s exactly what happened. After switching to SeatGeek, Barclays saw a “dramatic decline” in Live Nation-promoted concerts — from over 20 per year to fewer than eight. He cited a Billie Eilish show as his “smoking gun”: when the rescheduled New York date landed at UBS Arena instead of Barclays, Live Nation told the venue it was the “artist’s decision”; when asked, Eilish’s management was confused, and told them it was Live Nation’s choice. Abbamondi also described Ticketmaster “pulling up the drawbridge behind them,” refusing to accept SeatGeek barcodes and forcing concertgoers to manually exchange tickets. A year and a half into the SeatGeek contract, Abbamondi was fired. Less than a year after that, Barclays went back to Ticketmaster.
Barclays wasn’t the only venue to describe feeling trapped. Mitch Helgerson, chief revenue officer for the Minnesota Wild, testified that when his venue explored a competing proposal from SeatGeek during contract negotiations, a Ticketmaster executive warned that Live Nation could simply move its concerts to the Target Center across the river in Minneapolis. Helgerson called it a “credible threat” and said losing those shows would have been “almost catastrophic.” SeatGeek, apparently well aware that this is a recurring dynamic, offered the Wild what it literally called “Live Nation retaliation insurance”: a promise to compensate the venue if concerts were pulled. Even with that backstop, and even though SeatGeek’s deal would have netted the arena an additional million dollars a year, the Wild stayed with Ticketmaster. When the fear of retaliation from your ticketing provider is so widely understood that your competitor has a named insurance product for it, the word “monopoly” starts to feel pretty damn apt.
Live Nation, for its part, has pushed back on all of this. Marriott emphasized on cross-examination that switching ticketing platforms is genuinely complex, that SeatGeek had real usability shortcomings, that UBS Arena’s opening independently changed the competitive landscape in New York, and that Abbamondi has personal friendships with SeatGeek executives. These are not nothing arguments, but they also don’t really explain why Billie Eilish’s New York show ended up 20 miles from where it was originally booked, or why the Minnesota Wild left a million dollars a year on the table out of sheer fear.
The trial is expected to last about six weeks, with Kid Rock and Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett among the witnesses still to come, alongside Live Nation CEO Rapino, former Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff, and executives from rival firms and major venues. (Kid Rock told the Senate Commerce Committee in January that the ticketing industry is “full of greedy snakes and scoundrels,” which is a little rich coming from a man currently selling tickets to his Live Nation-partnered “Freedom 250” tour exclusively through Ticketmaster, but I digress.) There’s also a separate FTC lawsuit alleging that Live Nation cooperated with scalpers to inflate resale prices, which will be heard later in a California court—meaning the company is fighting on two legal fronts simultaneously, both of which boil down to the same essential question: has Live Nation grown so dominant that it can do whatever it wants to artists, fans, and venues, and simply dare them to do something about it?
If the first week is any guide, the government’s answer is yes. Whether a jury of twelve New Yorkers agrees remains to be seen, but the Barclays story alone—from the winky-face warning to the vanishing Billie Eilish concert to the inevitable crawl back to Ticketmaster—is not exactly the portrait of a healthy, competitive marketplace. It is, at best, the portrait of a company that has confused dominance with merit for so long that it no longer needs to tell the difference.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.