Alternative sources

- https://apnews.com/article/live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrus...

- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an... or https://archive.is/KA1wV

Background story by Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-tic... (April 13, 2026)

from the NYT: > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.

I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.

> The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.

I think the decimal point is a few digits too many to the left here... The various "fees" routinely add up to hundreds

There has been a bunch of reporting on this over the past couple years but will this even effect them?

In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.

Now do service fees and 'convenience' fees. Every ticket I buy for a movie somehow costs $2 extra now. (As with everything else). Robbery.

The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.

The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better.

I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.

Venue contracts are a sort of political firewall against any relevant ticketing technology becoming massive globally.

Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.

Concert seats should be handled the same as airline seats. I can buy the same airline seat from dozens of different places online. Why is that?

Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.

Cool, can't wait for the slap on the wrist and a $4 coupon we'll get in 2031.