The Department of Justice is reportedly preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, as soon as next month, marking a swing against the world’s biggest ticket seller and another chapter in the Biden administration’s ambitious anti-monopoly efforts.
The specific claims regulators would allege are unclear, but according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the suit, it will concern how the concert-promoting company has leveraged its dominance to undermine its competitors.
Ticketmaster and the Justice Department did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The DOJ launched an investigation into Ticketmaster in the summer of 2022 to probe alleged anticompetitive practices. A Senate subcommittee also launched an investigation last year.
While Ticketmaster has long been a target of hate for concert goers, musicians, and some venues, the ire reached a new level in the fall of 2022, when the site crashed during a fan presale for Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’. Fans suffered through a series of unfortunate events–hours- and days-long wait times for tickets, waves of bots purchasing and upselling tickets, and unpredictable prices–only for many of them to end up without tickets. The debacle saw members of Swift’s fan base suing Ticketmaster, too. The government’s latest move shows that these concerns are still top of mind for regulators hoping to crack down on the ticket seller’s practices.
It’s a sharp turnaround from a decade ago, when the DOJ essentially greenlit Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster. Since the 2010 deal, which merged the world’s largest live concert producer with the world’s leading live entertainment ticketing company, the group has faced international accusations of excessive ticket fees, poor customer service and bullying smaller competitors. At the time of the merger, the federal government cleared the deal but issued a legal order, called a consent decree, that barred the company from pressuring concert venues to use its ticketing software—something it has since been repeatedly accused of doing. The 10-year consent decree was extended in 2020, giving the Justice Department more power to regulate the company’s market dominance.
And without a doubt, that dominance is massive. Ticketmaster processes around 500 million tickets around the world each year and reportedly controls more than 80% of the market share for major concerts, according to a report by marketing software developer HubSpot. The company has been growing, too–its revenue reached $22.7 billion in 2023, according to its annual report, up 36% from the year before. Ticketmaster’s revenue also grew 73% between the first and second quarter of 2023 and the company sold a record-breaking 90 million tickets during the first five months of the year.
Ironically, though, the company’s indisputable profits are part of why it’s now the subject of several antitrust investigations meant to tackle potentially anticompetitive practices fueling the company’s growth.
One of those is the high price of tickets, which particularly outraged rapper Drake’s fan base over one of his March 2023 shows, where customers didn’t expect tickets to sell for hundreds of dollars. The year before, tickets to see rocker Bruce Springsteen reached as high as $5,000 on the platform, thanks to its pricing algorithm.
Ticketmaster has maintained that ticket prices are set by artists and their teams, and said in a blog post that “the venue normally gets around two-thirds of the service charge and in many cases a facility fee as well.” Still, the company has come under fire for those high service fees, which often tack on extra hundreds of dollars to ticket orders.
Beyond that, Ticketmaster’s heavyweight status has a stranglehold on the live events industry: nearly 78% of the highest-grossing arenas and 64% of the highest-grossing amphitheaters in the country operate using Ticketmaster’s services, according to an American Economic Liberties Project report from June 2023. With fewer competitors to buy from, that means that customers often can’t avoid paying the service fees Ticketmaster tacks on.
In a 2022 statement, Live Nations wrote that the market for secondary ticketing is “extremely competitive, with Ticketmaster competing with StubHub, SeatGeek, Vivid and many others,” and that “no serious argument can be made that Ticketmaster has the kind of market position in secondary ticketing that supports antitrust claims.”
Some analysts, like Brandon Ross of LightShed Ventures, said in a post on X that the lawsuit is likely to end in a settlement rather than a break-up of the company, since the government will likely target the company’s business practices rather than its model.
The federal lawsuit is one of several led by the Justice Department under Biden’s administration, which sued Apple in March for allegedly abusing its dominant position in smartphone and app markets and has sued Google several times since 2020.
