Live Nation Trial Begins With Fight Over Taylor Swift Eras Tour Sale

Live Nation’s antitrust trial with the Department of Justice kicked off Tuesday (March 3), with attorneys sparring over whether the concert giant is a “monopolist” that has “broken” the live music industry — and over Ticketmaster’s role in the infamous Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale.

On the first day of a trial expected to run at least a month, attorneys for the DOJ told jurors that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had “misused” their power over the concert business to “help themselves” at the expense of artists, venues, competitors and fans.

“The concert ticket ​industry is broken. In fact, the concert industry itself is broken,” DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist told the jury during his opening statement “It is controlled by a monopolist. It is controlled by Live Nation.”

Firing back for Live Nation and Ticketmaster was attorney David Marriott, who told jurors flatly that the companies “are not monopolists” and that the government had little hard data or evidence to support its sweeping allegations of market abuse.

“These are words. They are not proof, they are not evidence,” Mariott said during his own opening statement. “This marketplace is more competitive than ever before.”

The feds sued Live Nation in 2024, claiming the concert giant runs an illegal “flywheel” — reaping revenue from ticket buyers, using that money to sign artists, then leveraging that repertoire to lock venues into exclusive ticketing contracts that yield ever more revenue.

In his opening statement, Dahlquist told the jury that Ticketmaster held an 86 percent share in the primary ticketing market, while Live Nation controlled 78 percent of large amphitheaters. And he said the company had cemented that dominance with threats and retaliation, including withholding popular artists from venues that refused to use make Ticketmaster their exclusive ticketing service.

“If they don’t use Ticketmaster, they’re not going to send you concerts,” the government attorney told the jury. He specifically cited the well-documented case of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, which briefly switched to SeatGeek before switching back.

“Live Nation punished them,” Dahlquist said. “They were forced to go back to Ticketmaster.”

Marriott warned jurors the DOJ would not be able to prove such claims at trial. He said the feds had “cherry-picked” data to inflate market shares, meaning that Ticketmaster’s share was really more like 40% and Live Nation’s share of venues was more like 20%. And he added that claims about threats and retaliation were also overblown: “We don’t make [tour] routing decisions based on settling scores.”

Marriott devoted particular attention to the Barclays incident, which looks like it will play a key role in the trial. In his telling, the switch was made by a new arena CEO who had a prior “relationship” with SeatGeek, adding that though Live Nation chief Michael Rapino “lost his cool” during a heated phone call over the issue, he didn’t threaten to withhold concerts from the venue. When Barclays eventually switched back to Ticketmaster, it was “not because of any threats, but because SeatGeek fell down on the job.”

Another key flashpoint on Tuesday was the infamous 2022 presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried — and many failed — to buy tickets. The messy rollout sparked widespread criticism of Live Nation and Ticketmaster by fans, lawmakers and artists.

The DOJ echoed those gripes for the jury on Tuesday, with Dahlquist saying the high-profile Swift presale failure was emblematic of a company that had little competitive incentive to make sure that its customer service was reliable.

“Their technology is held together by duct tape,” the lawyer told jurors about the Swift incident. “They have prioritized growth over maintaining their systems.”

Marriott said Live Nation had taken ownership of the Swift failure, saying “there’s no question there was a problem.” But he said it was the result of cyberattacks and unprecedented traffic during the “single largest on sale ever” — and that no other ticketing company would have handled those challenges better than Ticketmaster had.

Following Tuesday’s opening statements, the government will begin presenting witnesses for the jury, starting with John Abbamondi, the one-time CEO of the parent company of the Barclays Center at the center of that dispute. Also expected to testify later are Live Nation’s Rapino and Joe Berchtold; execs at competitors AEG and SeatGeek; Irving Azoff, who was the boss of Ticketmaster when it merged with Live Nation in 2010; and artists like Kid Rock and Ben Lovett.

The trial itself will likely last for at least a month. Once both sides finish presenting all their witnesses and evidence, the jury will deliberate and come back with a verdict determining whether Live Nation has violated antitrust law. If found liable, the judge could order the breakup of the two companies, or he could impose injunctions banning certain practices.