While it was hardly unexpected, the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster is thorough and damning — all 124 pages of it — and lays out in compelling detail how and why the company, which is the world’s largest live-entertainment business and owns the largest ticket seller and distributor, may well be what this country legally considers a monopoly. Considering the vast resources at Live Nation ’s disposal — their 2023 revenue was nearly $23 billion — this battle is likely to play out over months in court, and in reality, music fans’ concerns boil down to one question: Would breaking up the two companies make the ticket-acquisition process less of a soul-crushing nightmare? In the short term anyway, the answer is pretty much no — and experts say things could get worse before they get better, considering how deeply entrenched Ticketmaster is in the entire process and the chaos that would follow a breakup. In fact, the things that most enrage fans — cryptic “service” fees, long wait times, the predatory secondary market and its bots that buy up blocks of tickets before ordinary humans can get near them — are outside the purview of the lawsuit.
It also must be noted, as Live Nation often does, that Ticketmaster does not set ticket prices — artists or promoters do — and it does not charge the bulk of the service fees that so enrage fans (venues do). In his introductory remarks during Thursday’s press conference, Attorney G.
