![]() That agreement worked, well, medium, as in 2019, the DOJ announced it was modifying and extending the agreement because the company was doing some of the things it said it wouldn’t. When the Justice Department gave the go-ahead for the merger, it said it had in place an agreement with the new Live Nation Entertainment that was supposed to stop the company from bullying behavior, such as retaliating against venues that went with other ticketing companies. “All vertical mergers are sold on the basis of these benefits to consumers, which, by the way, rarely ever pan out.” “Vertical mergers have always been given a lot of deference because they are alleged to produce lots of efficiencies,” Moss said. In the case of Live Nation-Ticketmaster, the argument goes something like it’s a good idea for venues, promoters, managers, and ticketers to share some infrastructure and control the whole chain top to bottom. The argument the parties involved in vertical mergers often make is that they help create efficiencies. That’s in contrast to a horizontal merger, where two companies that do the same thing - say, T-Mobile and Sprint - combine. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster tie-up that took place in 2010 is what is called a vertical merger, meaning a combination of companies operating at different levels of production. “Nobody likes Ticketmaster,” said Gary Witt, executive director of the Pabst Theater Group in Milwaukee, but the company is “fully willing to take on that dislike at the same time to be able to control and make that money.” Hey, vertical mergers seem weird and kind of bad Post-merger, concerns have gotten even greater that Live Nation Entertainment can’t be kept in check in terms of requiring artists to use its ticketing platform, charging fans high fees, and having an almost inevitable stronghold on the industry. The American Prospect has an excellent rundown of Ticketmaster’s complicated 40-year history here. Ticketmaster has long been a superpower in ticketing, and one multiple parties have sounded the alarm about over the years - Pearl Jam tried to take on Ticketmaster in the 1990s, as did the String Cheese Incident in the early 2000s. has to go along because there isn’t really anywhere else that’s viable to go. ![]() It can set whatever rules it wants, and everyone - in this case, customers, artists, venues, etc. The thing with a company being so big and having so much power is that it doesn’t have to try very hard to be good. “We have a monopoly that covers an entire supply chain.” It extends from artist management through concert promotion through venue management down to primary ticketing and now, of course, secondary ticketing, all the way down to the consumer-facing fan markets,” said Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute. “Live Nation-Ticketmaster is probably one of the best examples of a modern-day monopoly that blankets the live entertainment supply chain. But Taylor Swift isn’t why the DOJ is looking at Ticketmaster, and she’s not why you should be, either - at least not entirely. It is neat that the Swift debacle has people paying attention to Ticketmaster and its parent company’s stronghold on the entertainment industry. Emily Stewart’s column exposes the ways we’re all being squeezed under capitalism.
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