It's been a minute since Ticketmaster was last in the news, so let's recap. Ticketmaster bought most of its ticketing rivals, then merged with Live Nation, the country's largest promoter, and bought out many of the country's largest music, stage and sports venues. They used this iron grip on the supply chain for performances and events to pile innumerable junk fees on every ticket sold, while drastically eroding the wages of the creative workers they nominally represented.

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They created a secret secondary market for tickets and worked with ticket-touts to help them run bots that bought every ticket within an instant of the opening of ticket sales, then ran an auction marketplace that made them gigantic fees on every re-sold tickets, - fees the performers were not entitled to share in.

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The Ticketmaster/Live Nation/venue octopus is nearly impossible to escape. Independent venues can't book Live Nation acts unless they use Ticketmaster for their tickets. Acts can't get into the large venues owned by Ticketmaster unless they sign up to have Live Nation book their tour. And when Ticketmaster buys a venue, it creams off the most successful acts, starving competing venues of blockbuster shows.

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They also illegally colluded with their vendors to jack up the price of concerts across the board:

https://pascrell.house.gov/uploadedfiles/ful.pdf

When Rebecca Giblin and I were writing *Chokepoint Capitalism*, our book about how tech and entertainment monopolies impoverish all kinds of creative workers, we were able to get insiders to go on record about every kind of monopoly, from the labels to Spotify, Kindle to the Big Five publishers and the Google-Meta ad-tech duopoly.

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The *only* exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation: *everyone* involved in live performance - performers, bookers, club owners - was palpably terrified about speaking out on the record about the conglomerate:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

No wonder. The company has a long and notorious history of using its market power to ruin anyone who challenges it. Remember Pearl Jam?

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/

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But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Not only is Ticketmaster a rapacious, vindictive monopolist - it's also an *incompetent* monopolist, whose IT systems are optimized for rent-extraction first, with ticket sales as a distant afterthought. This is bad no matter which artist it effects, but when Ticketmaster totally, utterly fucked up Taylor Swift's first post-lockdown tour, they incurred the wrath of the Swifties:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/11/21/23471763/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-monopoly

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All of which explains why I've always given good odds that Ticketmaster would be first up against the wall come the antitrust revolution. It may not be the most destructive monopolist, but it is *absurdly* evil, and the people who hate it most are the most famous and beloved artists in the country.

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For a while, it looked like I was right. Ticketmaster's colossal Taylor Swift fuckup prompted Senator Amy Klobuchar - a leading antitrust crusader - to hold hearings on the company's conduct, and led to the introduction of a raft of bills to rein in predatory ticketing practices.

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But as @ddayen writes for *The American Prospect*, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is spreading a *fortune* around on the Hill, hiring a deep bench of ex-Congressmen and ex-senior staffers (including Klobuchar's former chief of staff) and they've found a way to create the appearance of justice without having to suffer *any* consequences for their decades-long campaign of fraud and abuse:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-30-live-nation-strikes-up-band-washington/

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Dayen opens his article with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is always bracketed by a week's worth of lavish parties for Congress and hill staffers. One of the fanciest of these parties was thrown by Axios - and sponsored by Live Nation, with a performance by Jelly Roll (whose touring contract is owned by Live Nation).

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Attendees at the Axios/Live Nation event were bombarded with messages about the essential goodness of Live Nation (they were even printed on the cocktail napkins) and exhortations to support the Fans First Act, co-sponsored by Klobuchar and Sen John Cornyn (R-TX):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/arts/music/fans-first-act-ticket-bill.html

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Ticketmaster/Live Nation loves the Fans First Act, because - unlike other bills - it focuses primarily on the secondary market for tickets, and its main measure is a requirement for ticketing companies to disclose their junk fees upfront. Neither of these represents a major challenge to Ticketmaster/Live Nation's control over the market, which gives it the ability to slash performers' wages while jacking up prices for fans.

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Fans First represents the triumph of Ticketmaster/Live Nation's media strategy, which is to blame the entire problem on bottom-feeding ticket-touts (who are mostly scum!) instead of on the single monopoly that controls the *entire industry* and can't stop committing financial crimes.

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Axios isn't Live Nation's only partner in selling this distraction tactic. Over the past five years, the company has flushed gigantic sums of money through Washington. Its lobbying spend rose from $240k in 2018 to $1.1m in 2022, and $2.38m in 2023:

https://thehill.com/business/4431886-live-nation-doubled-lobbying-spending-to-2-4m-in-2023-amid-antitrust-threat/

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