‘It Is Time to Break It Up’: Inside the DOJ’s Blockbuster Lawsuit Against Live Nation

J
onathan Kanter is standing in the basement recording studio of his Bethesda, Maryland, home, surrounded by an enviable collection of dozens of vintage and limited-edition guitars. It’s a warm June evening and the place feels like the Platinum Room at Guitar Center, with the walls covered in blond wood and baroque blue wallpaper. 

It’s his own mini dad-rock mecca. There’s the “engagement guitar” his wife got him after he joked that if she was getting an engagement ring, he wanted another six-string. A phalanx of Gibson hollow bodies and Les Paul Juniors hangs proudly near a custom-made Collings with a paw print on the headstock and a fur-black finish. (It’s named Murray after the family dog, a schnauzer-poodle mix.) And the crown jewel: a lightly modified 1960 sunburst Stratocaster.

There are dozens of guitar pedals, vintage tweed Fender amps scattered all over, and a few keyboards and synthesizers tucked under a center table. At least a dozen more guitars are hidden away in closets in the back of the room. 

Kanter, 51, is a longtime collector and music obsessive who spends his free time recording original songs, a hobby since high school. He studied electronic music while majoring in political science at SUNY Albany in the Nineties and calls himself “a child of New Wave music,” citing Depeche Mode and the Cure as his favorites.

He’s also the Joe Biden-appointed assistant attorney general heading up the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. The next morning, Kanter will don a sharp suit and head to the Robert F. Kennedy Building in Washington, D.C., where his team of approximately two dozen attorneys is preparing for trial in one of the most significant antitrust cases in decades: a blockbuster lawsuit that could result in a breakup of the live-music behemoth Live Nation-Ticketmaster. The suit marks one of the first times the DOJ has sought to split up a major corporation since it brought a case against Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The DOJ filed its lawsuit against Live Nation in May, alongside 30 attorneys general from red and blue states, accusing the company of operating as a monopoly. (Ten more states joined in August.) Kanter’s antitrust division has taken on giants like Apple and Google — winning a landmark case against the latter over its internet-search dominance — but he says nothing they’ve done has elicited a reaction among consumers and lawmakers alike quite like this.

“When we talk to family farmers concerned about meat-packers and processors, we hear the same sort of urgency. Same with health care,” Kanter tells Rolling Stone. “But people love music, and a monopolist is getting in the way of their ability to access it and making their lives more expensive.”

The complaint comes at what feels like a peak moment of fan frustration over the concert-going experience. While seeing the biggest artists live has been something of a splurge for decades (see the viral clip of Kurt Cobain reacting with disgust to learn Madonna was charging $50 a ticket in 1993), today it can cost as much as a month’s rent for the priciest tickets — and that’s if you even get through the byzantine purchase process.

For the most in-demand shows, seasoned fans know what to expect: Cross your fingers days in advance, hoping to get a Ticketmaster verified fan code that merely gives you the right to wait in a hellish online queue. Assuming technical difficulties from the high traffic don’t kick you out of line or crash the site altogether (condolences if you tried and failed to buy Oasis tickets in August), by the time you reach the lobby, you have to brace for sticker shock.

Statistically speaking, the average ticket price for the world’s 10 highest-grossing concerts has risen 26 percent over the past five years, according to research from the trade publication Pollstar. (A ticket to see Drake in 2023, for example, cost $260 on average, up from $116 in 2018.) Combined with the insult of dynamic pricing — the business tactic that can hike the ticket price hundreds of dollars based on demand — and the sense that much of your money is going to surcharges and hidden fees, the rising costs have driven fans mad. (Fees added, on average, another 27 percent to a purchase, according to a 2018 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.) Those who get shut out during the official sale and turn to the secondary ticket market fare no better. Today’s scalpers use bots to game the system and charge double the face value, or more.

Prices were so high to catch the U.S. leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2023, it was actually more affordable for some American fans to pay for tickets, airfare, and hotel combined to see the pop star in Paris — where scalping is much more regulated — rather than stateside. The cheapest seats Rolling Stone could find on StubHub for Swift’s Oct. 18 show in Miami were nearly $4,000 a pair, including fees. (Ticketmaster isn’t listing resold tickets for Swift’s shows.)

When Bruce Springsteen used dynamic pricing for his tour last year, he faced significant criticism from fans who felt he’d abandoned them and his working-class roots. Though his own team said most of the tickets for that tour were below $200, some cost thousands of dollars. The anger was palpable, with fan magazine Backstreets shutting down as publisher Chris Phillips wrote they were “disillusioned” with the ticketing practice.

Even artists lament the current state of the market. Last year, Zach Bryan announced he’d play mainly non-Ticketmaster venues for his Burn, Burn, Burn Tour. By September, he’d ended that battle, electing to play Ticketmaster venues for his Quittin’ Time Tour. “All my homies still do hate Ticketmaster but hard to realize one guy can’t change the whole system,” Bryan wrote on X. “It is intentionally broken and I’ll continue to feel absolutely horrible about the cost of tickets in an unfair market.”

Not all of these problems are attributable to Live Nation and Ticketmaster, of course. The concert giant has joined indie promoters in calling for lawmakers to more stringently regulate the resale market, and much of the live-music industry supports measures requiring ticket sellers to list fees upfront rather than hide them. The company will also be all too happy to tell you that artists are the ones who set ticket prices. But there’s still a sense that this arm of the music industry is utterly dysfunctional — and that the DOJ’s case could be one big step toward fixing it.

“There’s a lot of fans who understand music [is] more than commerce,” says Kevin Erickson, director of the music advocacy nonprofit The Future of Music Coalition, which has publicly called for a Live Nation breakup. “While it relies on having a business infrastructure to be able to operate, it runs deeper than that. It has hugely important personal meaning to so many music fans. The brazen ways that unaccountable private power has taken over live music might be common in other parts of the economy, [but it] reflects that music is special.”

“We’re an Exceedingly Modestly Profitable Company”

By the time I’m in Kanter’s home studio, it’s been about a month since the Justice Department announced its lawsuit against Live Nation, the culmination of an 18-month investigation into the company’s dominance over the live-music business. The suit paints the concert giant as a mob-like organization, complete with powerful “pimp” and “hammer” enforcers to stifle competitors, exclusivity deals that suffocate other ticketing companies, and threats of withholding artists from venues that dare try their luck with another ticketing provider.

Live Nation is unquestionably the most powerful entity in the live-music business. Valued at $25 billion, the company owns and operates hundreds of venues around the world, including a majority of the largest amphitheaters in the U.S. Its promotion business alone pulled in $4.5 billion in the third quarter of 2024, more than twice as much as its next largest competitor, AEG Presents, according to Pollstar. It’s one of the largest music-management companies, representing 380 artists last year. And thanks to its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster — the exclusive ticketing partner for most of the arenas and stadiums in the United States — it is the largest primary ticketing provider in the industry. It has a foot in the secondary market as well, allowing brokers and scalpers to sell tickets for shows on Ticketmaster’s website. (Live Nation maintains the resale marketplace is a small part of its business.)

Despite the fact that the DOJ itself approved that merger nearly 15 years ago (with some strings), it now views it as detrimental to the industry. “We are not here today because Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s conduct is inconvenient or frustrating,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference in May. “We are here because … that conduct is anticompetitive and illegal. We allege that Live Nation has illegally monopolized markets across the live-concert industry in the United States for far too long. It is time to break it up.”

The DOJ says, in part, that Live Nation is so big it can lure artists into touring contracts with huge payouts that smaller competitors can’t afford. In turn, they say, tickets are becoming more and more expensive as fans absorb the costs of those contracts in fees.

Live Nation has vehemently denied the department’s claims, asserting that it only sees a modest amount of the total fees Ticketmaster charges. (Live Nation says venues take two-thirds of ticket fees to cover operation costs for concerts.) Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, says the DOJ’s suit “ignores everything that is actually responsible for higher ticket prices,” such as high production costs, predatory scalping, and even musicians themselves. 

Speaking with Rolling Stone at Live Nation’s Beverly Hills headquarters, Wall emphasizes that it’s the artists who set ticket prices “fundamentally based on supply and demand.” He also maintains that the driving issue behind high ticket prices is scalpers who use sophisticated bots and dummy accounts to flood the primary market and secure tickets for the most in-demand shows, then gouge fans for those tickets on resale sites. A breakup of Live Nation, Wall says, won’t solve this problem.

In a May post on its website rebutting the lawsuit, Live Nation presented data it says shows that its fee earnings and profit margins are far lower than comparable figures for service providers like Uber and tech giants like Meta. “The data conflicted too much with [the DOJ’s] preconception that Live Nation belongs in the ranks of the other ‘tech monopolists’ they have targeted,” Wall, who is also a lecturer on antitrust at University of California, Berkeley’s School of Law, wrote in the post. “At bottom, we are another casualty of this administration’s decision to turn over antitrust enforcement to a populist urge that simply rejects how antitrust law works.”

“People love music, and a monopolist is getting in the way of their ability to access it and making their lives more expensive”

Jonathan Kanter

In Wall’s view, the live-music industry is functioning more or less as it should considering certain market realities. “There’s an ongoing natural experiment out in the world where there’s every combination you can think of — a different promoter, a different ticketing company, a Live Nation venue or non-Live Nation venue — and it doesn’t make any difference on the price of tickets,” Wall says. “J onathan Kanter is being extremely disingenuous in what he says to the American public about ticket prices.”

Furthermore, Wall says, the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger made live music a sustainable business given that, separately, both concert promotion and ticketing are historically low-margin businesses. “People think we’re this filthy-rich monopolist when we’re an exceedingly modestly profitable company,” he says. “It’s a good business, but the monopoly narrative has to be reconciled with this…. The irony of all this is that the biggest barrier to taking on Ticketmaster is probably because Ticketmaster doesn’t engage in monopolist pricing the way monopolies are supposed to.”

Not everyone is buying Wall’s argument. As one live-music industry insider, who requested anonymity over fear of retaliation from Live Nation, says: “They point the finger everywhere except the mirror.”

Fairly or not, pissed-off Swifties certainly blamed the company for the chaotic Eras Tour sale in 2022, which saw long online queues, technical difficulties, and sky-high prices. “Ticketmaster is a multi BILLION dollar company. They knew the demand for these tickets. They need better systems. Fans get let down time after time,” one furious fan tweeted the day tickets went on sale. “‘We put the fans first,’ no you don’t. If you did, you would have this issue solved by now after YEARS of things like this happening.” 

The situation became a PR disaster that brought the ticketing marketplace back to the national consciousness, as dozens of Swifties filed a class-action lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. Though the case was later dismissed, the public outcry did inspire a Senate judiciary committee hearing in which lawmakers scrutinized Live Nation for hours (while making one too many Swift-inspired puns). 

Asked what he thinks spurred the DOJ’s investigation, Wall cites not the Swifties but complaints from competitors like SeatGeek and AEG. He further states that AEG’s statements on the matter should be taken “with a bucket of salt,” adding, “They’re trying to get what they can out of the legal process.” 

“While we are flattered that Live Nation believes that AEG can bend the United States Department of Justice to its will, that’s not how the legal system works,” AEG said in a statement. “Yes, Live Nation’s monopolistic business practices hurt AEG. But that’s not what the DOJ’s lawsuit is about. It’s about fostering greater competition for the benefit of artists and fans.”

SeatGeek declined to comment for this article. But back when the DOJ first announced the lawsuit, the company said it was “hopeful that the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit to break up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly will restore fair market competition to live entertainment.”

Kanter and the DOJ decline to say if any specific incident spurred the investigation — though they assert that the Eras Tour fiasco did not play a role. Rather, they describe the probe and subsequent lawsuit as the culmination of “a steady stream of concerns coming from both industry and consumers” about Live Nation-Ticketmaster.

“When I came in [as assistant attorney general], I asked [staff] about it, and the response I got was a very strong degree of concern that had accumulated over the course of many years,” Kanter says. “It was pushing on an open door.”

“Until Recently, The Regulators … Haven’t Been Doing Their Jobs”

Live Nation wasn’t always the dominant player in the promotion space. Until the late Nineties, a collection of regional promoters around the country, such as Bill Graham Presents in the Bay Area and Cellar Door Productions in Washington, D.C., had significant control over their respective markets. Then businessman Robert Sillerman started spending billions of dollars to acquire many of those smaller outfits and sold the resulting company to the radio conglomerate Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) in 2000. Clear Channel spun off that business in 2005, establishing the promotion firm now known as Live Nation. 

From that point on, promotion was a national game — and Live Nation was the de facto concert leader. The company and the live-music industry grew in lockstep through the aughts; as record sales plummeted due to rampant piracy in the digital age, artists turned to touring to make up the losses. By the time Live Nation announced its merger with Ticketmaster in 2009, it had about $4.1 billion in revenue. 

The internet had other ripple effects. It opened a huge opportunity for ticket resale and scalping, as services like StubHub and Vivid Seats made it easier for brokers, scalpers, and casual ticket holders to resell their tickets online. It’s also made it much easier for fans to voice their frustration with the system and coalesce around their cause.

Prior to that, artists had the biggest megaphone in the fight against Ticketmaster. Pearl Jam railed against the company’s service-fee policy way back in 1994, well before the Live Nation merger. The band even went so far as to file an antitrust complaint with the Justice Department. Testifying to Congress, guitarist Stone Gossard called the relationship between promoters and venues “incestuous” and decried “the lack of any national competition for Ticketmaster that has created the situation we’re dealing with today.” (The department closed the investigation the following year with no action.) “If Pearl Jam couldn’t do it,” Rolling Stone wrote in 1995, “who can?”

Thirty years later, the DOJ’s lawsuit could finally be a first step toward lower prices. Still, music-industry experts like Erickson say breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster isn’t enough. Regulation of the secondary market is crucial to fixing the system, too. “Rampant, unregulated, deceptive, and predatory behavior by secondary sellers [have] added new and innovative forms of dysfunction on top of the existing dysfunction,” Erickson says. “Until recently, the regulators, policymakers, and enforcers who could’ve done something haven’t been doing their jobs.

“Live Nation-Ticketmaster is allowed to make the rules and reshape the industry in ways that degrade the experience for fans,” Erickson adds, “and leave artists and venues with fewer options.”

Getting industry stakeholders like artists, venue owners, and promoters to be vocal on these issues, however, has been challenging for Kanter’s team. “I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback at a personal level, but it’s really quiet, and that’s consistent with the trouble we had getting people to speak up,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti tells Kanter on a call in June. “People recognize there’s a problem here, but nobody really wants to stick their head up. But at things like kids’ birthday parties, where [I see] a lot of folks in the industry, I get a lot of grateful feedback.”

A DOJ source tells Rolling Stone the department reached out to “A-listers across every genre” who had issues with Ticketmaster in recent years to discuss the lawsuit publicly, but were told it was “too hot for them to weigh in.” (Rolling Stone contacted the 10 highest-grossing touring artists of last year for this story; all either declined to comment or did not respond.) 

“We Take Our Work Seriously, But Not Ourselves”

Under Kanter, the antitrust team has brought a verve not seen in the division in years. The bespectacled, Queens-born attorney has a gravitational pull in his office as a high-energy leader who seldom sits still and has created an irreverent culture in the office. (Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, once described the Kanter-led department to Rolling Stone as “not your grandpa’s DOJ.”)

The team refers to its main conference room — where visitors and investigation targets alike meet with the antitrust heads — as “hot sauce,” both a Beyoncé reference and a hint that this is their “situation room.” A bottle of Cholula rests pointedly atop a fireplace mantle there. The room next door is called “mild,” complete with an unopened jar of Tostitos mild salsa. 

“We take our work seriously, but not ourselves,” says Kanter — and several deputy assistant attorney generals at the antitrust department agree.

“Is this typical for how the antitrust department has looked in the past?” I ask John Elias, one of the antitrust division’s deputy assistant attorney generals who’s worked there for over 15 years. “No, definitely not,” he says.

Early in his tenure, Kanter had a custom hourglass made, timed to exactly six minutes, a nod to the increments in which the most elite law firms charge for their time. “Their clients like it,” Kanter says. “The lawyers, not so much.” A decal adorning the back of his iPhone features a red circle with a slash over the letters “DB”: It stands for “No Douchebags.”

Kanter’s own office is similarly colorful. A Muppet version of Kanter wearing a Mike Wazowski hat from Monsters, Inc. sits right outside the lobby, while a small stuffed version of Kanter’s dog Murray (the antitrust department’s unofficial mascot) rests below, alongside a board game that reads “Anti-Monopoly.”

Monopoly imagery is a common theme throughout the office, with about a half-dozen artworks of the board game or its iconic mustachioed mascot, Mr. Monopoly, on display, including in Kanter’s personal restroom. The bookcase behind his desk has several Monopoly pictures and figurines, along with photos of Murray, Kanter’s children, and Fiona, the hippo born prematurely at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens in 2017. On the top shelf is an unopened bottle of Yoo-hoo, a John Lennon figurine, and a Mets cap and bobblehead, all of which Kanter says are there “to remind me of my childhood.”

Kanter started his career at the Federal Trade Commission in 1998, then went into private practice and represented companies like Microsoft and Yelp in their antitrust cases against fellow tech giant Google. Eventually, he grew disillusioned with the state of antitrust law, believing that the government had failed to protect its citizens from increasingly powerful tech juggernauts. 

“To me, the American dream is to own your own house and own your own business. That was the pathway to success,” Kanter says, sitting on a blue leather chair in his office. A Jerry Garcia Funko pop and Kanter’s Ukrainian-American grandfather’s certificate of naturalization sit on a coffee table nearby. “As I went through my career, I realized that what antitrust enforcement was supposed to help preserve — that opportunity — was not doing that, and, in fact, the system was an obstacle.

“The power that big companies have can rival governments if not exceed them. That’s not freedom, that’s not opportunity,” he adds. “If you can’t build a business and succeed on your own merits … that’s not a market-based economy, that’s not capitalism. That’s exploitation.” 

“A Scalpel Rather Than a Sledgehammer”

When Live Nation looked to merge with Ticketmaster in 2009, the company argued it was essential to stabilize two rocky businesses — ticketing and concert promotion. It also touted the merger as a lifeline to get artists paid at a time when their royalties were tanking.

“The music-industry model that existed when I entered the business is irreparably broken,” Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino told a Senate hearing on the merger in 2009, also pointing toward the extreme growth of the scalping business. “In the old model, the record label supported the artist[s], record sales were the hub, and everything else — concerts, promotion, merchandising — flowed from that.… That model is as obsolete as an eight-track tape.”

Rapino wasn’t wrong. Touring has become a much bigger moneymaker in an era where many artists complain of paltry royalty checks off of hundreds of thousands of streams. (One 2022 study from the American Economics Liberties Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank that has called for a Live Nation breakup, noted that touring makes up roughly 95 percent of a musician’s income.) For rising and mid-tier artists, touring expenses still make earning a living on the road difficult. Today, no one is writing bigger checks to touring artists than Live Nation.

Competitors voiced their concerns quickly, arguing that Live Nation had already monopolized the promotion space more or less since its inception. But the DOJ allowed the merger anyway. Supposed safeguards were put into place, most notably a “consent decree” that said Live Nation couldn’t retaliate against other venues by withholding artists’ shows if they used another ticketing company.

Christine Varney, the assistant attorney general who greenlit the merger, called the agreement “vigorous antitrust enforcement — only with a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer.” Varney added that the settlement “allowed us to secure a package of remedies that mitigated consumer harm while still allowing the parties to prove that together they could discount, innovate, or otherwise benefit the live-music industry and its fans.” 

Critics blasted the decision — and point to the current situation as evidence that their concerns were justified. David Balto, a longtime antitrust lawyer who worked at the DOJ in the Nineties, represented several of Live Nation’s competitors at the time. Balto fervently opposed the merger, testifying before a 2009 Senate Judiciary committee and meeting with the DOJ several times to warn about potential fallout for the industry.

“There were clear competitive concerns, but this was a timid agency unwilling to test the limits of the law,” Balto says. “The paycheck of a staff attorney in the antitrust division says ‘trial attorney.’ Their job is to go to trial. Their job is not to interpret a consent decree and figure out how to regulate a market.”

Nancy Prager, a lawyer who worked with antitrust attorneys in 2009 to block the merger, calls the anti-retaliation agreement “incredibly frustrating.” “The merger should never have been allowed to happen, and now, 14 years later, that error has been recognized,” Prager says. After speaking to the DOJ at the time, she says, she felt it was failing to properly consider all of the many businesses the combined company would oversee.

“The Department of Justice failed in two ways. They really didn’t understand the industry they were working with,” she says. “And they didn’t understand the magnitude of the monopolies that were already in place. They just really missed it altogether.”

“We are another casualty of this administration’s decision to turn over antitrust enforcement to a populist urge that simply rejects how antitrust law works.”

Live Nation’s Dan Wall

Balto and the live-music industry insider recall being summoned to the DOJ’s office soon after the merger confirmation. The insider remembers the Justice Department lawyers framing the consent decree as a key victory in stabilizing the market and staving off the industry’s concerns. “We all looked at each other in there just thinking, ‘This is bullshit,’” the insider says. 

The following few years weren’t any more comforting for Live Nation’s critics, who’ve only felt more strongly that the merger has warped the industry. The company faced a DOJ investigation in 2018 over retaliation allegations from several venues, settling the claims in 2020 and extending the consent decree to 2025.

But retaliation allegations surface in the government’s new complaint as well. In the lawsuit, the DOJ points to one major venue ending a contract with SeatGeek to return to Ticketmaster, claiming Live Nation withheld shows at the venue. (Wall denies those claims, alleging that tech issues on SeatGeek’s platform led to the switch. The low number of retaliation claims the DOJ had cited since the consent decree started “has proven a very, very high degree of compliance, not of non-compliance,” he says.)

Live Nation-Ticketmaster competitors say that even the potential for retaliation keeps venues from signing with other ticketers, which they say further proves the DOJ’s previous efforts at deterrence didn’t help.

As one former ticketing executive who’d spoken with the DOJ during its investigation tells Rolling Stone, the company doesn’t need to spell out the pluses and minuses of going with Ticketmaster — in fact, they’re better off not being explicit, lest their business proposition be viewed as a threat. “Venues don’t have to be told [what would happen],” the former executive says. “Ticketmaster reps are probably told not to say [anything]. Many venues look at it as beneficial [to deal with them] knowing you’ll get more shows.”

“There’s just no reason we should have had to settle for this,” says Erickson. “The only reason is that the people whose job it was [to regulate the industry] let themselves get blinded by this toxic faith in unregulated markets that ended up meaning the corporations have been making the rules.”

“This Is Going to Be a Blip”

Once an aggressive trust-busting force, the DOJ grew more conservative in the cases it pursued over the past 40 years, giving way to looser regulation and allowing the markets some autonomy. While the antitrust department is reportedly considering a breakup of Google, big swings like that are far from the norm.

Throughout the 2000s, several current and former DOJ employees tell Rolling Stone, it was relatively unheard of for the antitrust division to challenge mergers at all. “You need[ed] clear and convincing evidence that a merger is going to produce bad results [like] higher prices, lower output, lower quality, and if you have any doubt about that, you’re better off not enforcing,” Bill Baer, the former assistant attorney general who took over just after the Live Nation merger, says over coffee in the cafeteria at the Brookings Institution, the public-policy nonprofit where he is now a visiting fellow. 

Another former DOJ lawyer familiar with the department’s 2018 Live Nation inquiry praised Varney for putting up any resistance to the merger at all. “She pushed for there to be relief at a time where these sorts of cases and challenges were not in vogue,” the executive, who requested anonymity, says. “People like to look back and be critical, but at the time, she was deemed aggressive for even pushing for the decree.”

To Balto, Varney would’ve gone harder on Live Nation during those proceedings, but she was limited by a staff uncertain they could win. “The staff was like, ‘No we can’t do this, we’re going to lose,’” Balto adds. “But what’s the harm in losing?”

Back then, regulators were optimistic that those consent decrees would protect the markets. However bullish Varney’s move was perceived to be at the time, today, all the antitrust attorneys Rolling Stone spoke with agree that the consent decree didn’t work as intended. 

“Live Nation subtly and increasingly not-so-subtly found ways to evade the commitments they’d made. That’s why my successor under Trump went after them,” Baer says. “Arguably, he should’ve sued for a breakup then because they already demonstrated you can’t trust them to honor their commitments.”

“They cut off all the different vectors, and they all work together.”

Jonathan Kanter

Wall says he doesn’t expect the antitrust division’s hardened stance under Kanter to last when his tenure is done. 

“This is going to be a blip,” he says. “Antitrust has been one of the few areas of business regulation that has been marked by a fundamental bipartisan consensus on what the rules are and what the goals are. This group who’s in office right now is challenging that consensus, and when they’re gone, the consensus reestablishes itself.” (Asked about Wall’s claim, Kanter says that “the work that we’re doing is the current consensus.”)

“There is a pattern here of wanting to bring big-impact monopoly cases against the companies that have platforms,” Wall continues. “There’s nothing in the four corners of this lawsuit that we couldn’t have potentially settled and compromised. Jonathan Kanter wanted nothing to do with settlement negotiations that were going to get in the way of filing this case.”

In some ways, it feels like Kanter’s department is seeking to undo the very work his predecessors did over a decade ago when they allowed the merger to take place. Asked directly if he feels the DOJ made a mistake, Kanter is guarded. “You have to focus on what’s in front of you,” he says. “Our case isn’t about a merger; it’s about what happened after a merger.”

Still, he says, “We take a clear-eyed look at the facts to determine if there’s a problem. And if there is a problem, we call it like we see it.”

Does Kanter think anything short of an absolute Ticketmaster-Live Nation breakup will remedy the situation? “We were very clear in our lawsuit and in our statement around our lawsuit about what we think the proper remedy is,” he says. Meaning: A breakup is necessary. “We are not that direct in all of our cases.”

“Abuse, Exploitation, and Self-Dealing”

The DOJ’s investigation moved quickly. As Kanter and multiple other DOJ officials confirm, the team had already been several months into their investigation by the time the Eras Tour debacle unfolded in November 2022. Both he and his principal deputy assistant attorney general, Doha Mekki, say it had little impact on how they would handle the rest of their inquiry.

“If you had seen what we’d already seen at that point, [the Eras Tour] did not strike me as any notable event in our investigation,” Mekki says. “Ticketmaster had its explanation for what happened. Obviously, there are times where demand outstrips supply. That’s just the way the market works. Our claim was about something different; [it was] about abuse, exploitation, and self-dealing.”

Mekki is referencing Live Nation’s so-called “flywheel” model, a complex web of interconnected businesses under its control where the more profitable sectors, like ticketing and sponsorship from corporations and advertisers, subsidize its less profitable concert-promotion business. The DOJ asserts that that puts smaller competitors without multifaceted businesses at an unfair disadvantage.

Wall calls that flywheel argument “all rhetoric.” He acknowledges that it’s much harder for competing companies to thrive without vertical integration — a strategy where companies have their hands in multiple aspects of a business, like, in Live Nation’s case, ticketing, promotion, and artist management — but adds that Live Nation’s largest competitors operate this way as well. 

“Everybody is vertically integrated in this industry, and that is because these pieces by themselves are not very profitable industries. You have to find the efficiencies of combining them to be a competitor.”

The lawsuit says Live Nation has dominated the market through its exclusivity agreements with venues. Many venues happily sign the deal both for cash advances Ticketmaster will provide them and to avoid the headache of dealing with more than one ticketer at shows. But the DOJ alleges that the Ticketmaster exclusives are predatory. According to the department, the deals shut out competing ticketing companies for years as they wait for contracts to end so they can get in the ring. 

The DOJ also claims Live Nation colluded with the venue developer Oak View Group (OVG), which acted as a “pimp” and “hammer” enforcer to get more venues to use Ticketmaster. (Neither Oak View Group, co-founded by industry titan and former Ticketmaster chairman Irving Azoff, nor any of its executives are listed as defendants in the lawsuit. A rep for Oak View Group declined to comment.) The department filing includes emails between Live Nation CEO Rapino and another OVG co-founder in which Rapino reprimands OVG after the company put in an offer to promote an artist’s show, with Rapino claiming such an action would only cause the artist’s team to start asking for higher compensation. “What’s up?” Rapino wrote. “We have done his [touring] and vegas[.] Let’s make sure we don’t let [the artist agency] now start playing us off.” 

Further, the DOJ alleges that in at least one instance, Live Nation violated the 2010 consent decree by withholding shows from venues that use services other than Ticketmaster. “The longer the conduct goes on, and the more entrenched the company is, the more widespread the behavior,” Kanter says. 

By the fall of 2023, the DOJ believed it had enough evidence against Live Nation for a potential antitrust complaint. It just wasn’t sure how to present it in a lawsuit. Kanter says a flux capacitor helped officials reach their conclusion. In almost any other context, the device that helps Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel through time in Back to the Future is merely the stuff of science fiction: a Y-shaped light device attached in the back of a DeLorean. But at the DOJ, it’s real. Kind of. 

“Doc Brown says this is what makes time travel possible, but this is what makes monopolization cases possible,” Kanter says. In the antitrust division, “flux capacitor” means identifying changes that target the core of a monopoly rather than its symptoms. 

As I follow Kanter to several events in which he talks about antitrust in agriculture, artificial intelligence, or media, the philosophical through line is the same: A lack of competition in the marketplace will trickle down to the entire ecosystem around it, and stopping it requires more robust antitrust action. In the Live Nation case, the “flux capacitor” would mean targeting their “flywheel” and, as Kanter says, breaking up the company.

“If you want the promoter, you have to use the ticketing. If you want access to the venue, you have to use the ticketing,” Kanter explains. “If you want access to the artist, you have to use the ticketing and the promoter. They cut off all the different vectors, and they all work together.”

The flux-capacitor theory is so crucial to the DOJ’s work that Kanter keeps a printed-out image of the fictional device on his desk. To prove the point, he pulls two deputies into the office, one at a time, quizzing them quickly on what the flux capacitor is. Without missing a beat, both give virtually the same answer: more aggressive antitrust policy. 

This DOJ views monopolistic companies like an octopus, with many tentacles holding a vise grip over every aspect of a business it feeds on. Mekki and another executive within the antitrust division have octopus plush toys in their office to reinforce the metaphor. In an earlier era, they’d go after “the tentacles,” Kanter says. 

But, Mekki says, pointing at the octopus in the corner of her office, “If you cut off the tentacle, you’ve still got an octopus.”

“They grow back,” Kanter interjects. 

“But if you go for the head … ” she says, not having to finish the sentence. 

There’s no certainty that the DOJ will prevail in its case, or that a divestment of Ticketmaster and Live Nation would drastically change the experience for consumers. 

Kanter and his team are also weeks away from an election that could find a new president cleaning house entirely. Such a move seems all but inevitable if Donald Trump wins, and it’s unclear if Kamala Harris would maintain the status quo with the Joe Biden appointee or install a new team. Still, Kanter and Mekki seem unperturbed, pointing to the bipartisan support this suit has drawn.

“Ticketmaster is our attempt to say that in this industry … it’s not just about the venues. It’s not just about the promoter. It’s not just about workers. It all works together to basically take money from consumers, and often [take] away from artists, who the market should be rewarding,” Mekki says. “More of it gets sucked out in the middle, and it always comes up Live Nation.”