The waters were chummed. Thanks to a fiasco around Taylor Swift ticket sales in late 2022, few companies have seen their predatory business practices get as bright a limelight as the one that has shone on Ticketmaster and its parent, Live Nation Entertainment. Swift’s fans had a disastrous couple of days trying to buy tickets to the Eras Tour, and the relatively few who succeeded paid exorbitant, ticky-tack fees. A congressional hearing followed. Senators from both parties gave Live Nation the Big Tobacco hearing treatment. One of Ticketmaster’s biggest rivals told lawmakers to break the giant up.

We’ll never know if Thursday’s 124-page Justice Department lawsuit against Live Nation, alleging all manner of antitrust violations, would have come about now if not for the Swift mess. We’ll especially not know if 30 state attorneys general, including a handful of Republicans, would’ve joined the suit if countless pop music fans in their states weren’t driven to rage by a high-profile moment of ticketing incompetence. But one of the striking things about the lawsuit, which calls explicitly for the breakup of Live Nation and separation of its Ticketmaster business from its other revenue lines, is that a CTRL-F through the document says nothing about the Taylor moment.

The feds’ case against Live Nation isn’t really about all the bullshit that Ticketmaster puts fans through when they want to take in a concert. To be clear, it has plenty of time for that. But this lawsuit fits with a recent Justice Department tradition of not just going after anti-competitive businesses but doing so on behalf of a much more sprawling group of stakeholders than just consumers. The message of the lawsuit is that, yes, music fans get a bad deal because of Ticketmaster’s dominance in the ticketing space, but Live Nation’s most corrosive impact is on the events world as a whole, poison not just to fans but to venues, artists, and promoters too. And the only tonic, according to the feds, is to stop letting Live Nation be so many things at once.

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The history of American antitrust laws is long, but it is fair to say that these laws are traditionally used to protect “consumers, taxpayers, and workers.” Do not take my word for it, but take the Justice Department’s when it describes the effect of antitrust law in exactly those terms. The government doesn’t want companies to be insulated from competition, whether by colluding to keep prices high or to keep wages low. Americans get more innovative products for less money. Workers make better wages. That’s the point and the collective effect of the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, the two biggies in the field.

In the past few years, the Biden administration has dabbled with a more expansive approach, and not just via the appointment of an antitrust hawk to lead the Federal Trade Commission. In 2021 and 2022, the Justice Department succeeded in blocking the takeover of publishing behemoth Simon & Schuster by fellow giant Penguin Random House. Book publishing used to have a Big Six, but consolidation made it a Big Five, and the latest transaction would have made it a Big Four. The DOJ did believe that the deal was bad for consumers, who could have gotten less variety of books and paid more for them. But perhaps the sharpest focus of the case was on how consolidation affected authors, who were at risk of losing one of vanishingly few publishers who might pay them for their work. (In an awkward victory with its own strings attached, Simon & Schuster went to a private equity firm.) The matter wasn’t about the publishers’ employees or book buyers as much as it was about another vendor in the supply chain, perhaps the most important one: the people who actually write the books.

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The Live Nation lawsuit carries on this approach. The feds lament the way Ticketmaster, by far the biggest player in concert ticketing, piles costs that “far exceed fees in comparable parts of the world” onto concertgoers’ laps. But the suit is really about an ecosystem, about how Live Nation’s control of a ticketing giant contributes to its control of venues and event promotion and worsens the whole enterprise. Artists have less freedom to promote their work as they see fit and perform in ideal venues. Promoters miss out on lots of business if they don’t play by Live Nation’s rules. And concert venues are at risk of not getting good acts if they don’t work within a ticketing system that (for one thing) sucks and (for another) may not enable them to maximize their revenue and keep their patrons happy.

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Begin where all music begins: with the artist. The federal complaint spends a lot of time on the relationship between Live Nation and a potential competitor–turned–partner called Oak View Group. Specifically, the suit turns up correspondence between the two companies’ leadership in which Live Nation gets wind that Oak View Group is bidding to be the promoter of an artist’s tour that Live Nation would prefer to promote. Live Nation’s CEO, Michael Rapino, emails Oak View Group’s CEO and says it would be “stupid” to “play into the hands” of the artist’s agent by letting the companies bid against each other to promote the tour. Oak View’s CEO agrees and literally writes, “I never want to be competitors.” An artist, then, gets worse offers from potential promoters, who arrange the show’s logistics and help sell it to the public.

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But that works out well for Oak View, which gets to host events at its venues featuring artists who are under promotional contract with Live Nation. The feds say that Oak View Group has described itself as both a “hammer” and a “pimp” to protect Live Nation’s interests, despite being positioned to compete.

Meanwhile, Live Nation owns tons of music venues, and it can withhold access to those venues from 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 country’s 50 biggest. As the owner of 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 crowds. The lawsuit features a Live Nation executive urging employees not to increase promotional offers to artists in that bucket, knowing they lack other options. And for access to the amphitheater, the complaint says, artists lock themselves into long-term Live Nation deals.

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That’s at the venues Live Nation owns. At other venues, the lawsuit describes a routine practice of Live Nation demanding that venues use Ticketmaster as their ticketing service in order to get Live Nation acts. Rapino, the CEO, has described the dynamic in shockingly mafialike terms, which the Justice Department excerpts in the suit. Rapino, in public, acknowledged not being able to explicitly withhold Live Nation acts from venues that don’t want to use Ticketmaster, but then said, “We have to put the show where we make the most economics, and maybe that venue won’t be the best economic place anymore because we don’t hold the revenue.” Thus, a venue not keen on using Ticketmaster may not have tickets to sell at all—at least not to a frontline act that’s part of the Live Nation portfolio.

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Non-Live Nation promoters catch hell, too. The complaint describes one that arranged a concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum and contracted with StubHub, not Ticketmaster, to manage ticketing. Ticketmaster, claiming exclusive rights to sell tickets to Coliseum concerts, “threatened to deny entry to any fan using a StubHub-issued ticket,” according to the suit. StubHub stopped selling tickets to the event, and the DOJ says that “hundreds” of customers with StubHub tickets weren’t able to get into the concert.

This is all quite rotten. It should not be allowed, and the official position of the United States is that it isn’t allowed, and Live Nation’s businesses should be broken apart. (The company’s promotional business is much bigger than its ticketing business, doing about six times as much revenue out of a $22 billion total in 2022.) Live Nation’s dominance is bad for ticket buyers, but the suit makes clear it’s bad for so many other parties involved in staging a concert. And that begins, as everything in music does, with the artist.

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The federal government is mounting similar cases right now against Amazon (via the FTC) and Apple (the DOJ), accusing each of them of abusively using dominance in certain areas to bully competitors in others. The government has plenty of potential targets if it wants to mount more of these cases. The most Live Nation–esque target might be Fanatics, the sports retailer whose occasionally shoddy merchandise, quality control, and customer service have made it one of the most disdained brands in sports. But the biggest problem with Fanatics isn’t the lousy Major League Baseball uniforms it collaborated on with Nike. It is the way Fanatics has amassed market power to get its way in numerous sectors of the sports industry, from trading cards to licensing to retail. The real story there isn’t bad jerseys as much as corporate power, just how the big problem with Ticketmaster wasn’t all those Taylor Swift tickets.