Live Nation antitrust chief continues to blame ‘scalper’

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As he battles across the United States with lawmakers seeking to clamp down on alleged anti-competitive behavior and major consumer ticketing issues, Live Nation’s new executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs is trying once again to spin the narrative. An article published Tuesday night lays out the familiar basics, telling consumers that it’s not his company’s price-gouging tactics or massive market power that’s ruining the live entertainment business, but the usual front men of ” scalpers” and “bots”.

Dan Wall, who worked for Live Nation Entertainment as an outside attorney before joining the team in early 2023, posted the opinion piece that lays out the familiar arguments that more or less say Live Nation doesn’t isn’t “too big to care” as FTC Chairman. Lina Khan said following her failed Taylor Swift ticket sales process. “It’s the Tickets, Stupid” tries to point out that ticket resale companies have a lot to gain from the many pro-consumer reforms that have been proposed at both the state and federal level in recent months, which therefore negates the fact that they are good for consumers.

“One of the most revered antitrust principles is that antitrust laws were enacted to protect competition, not competitors. The principle has been invoked countless times when some competitor’s antitrust complaint, ostensibly filed to further the interests of consumers, was in fact only serving their selfish interests,” Wall says in the opening of the lengthy post. “The antitrust cases brought against Ticketmaster today by secondary ticketing companies like SeatGeek are an example of this. Resale markets want antitrust law to protect their narrow business interests, not anything about competition or welfare. Worse still, these commercial interests are about high-volume bill scalping, which is about as far removed from consumer welfare as it gets.

The argument is one that Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster and other event operators and ticketing companies have been making for years. It has been used to justify the increased use of mobile-only ticketing, skyrocketing “dynamic” and “platinum” ticketing systems, and fan registration systems such as “verified fan”. They’ve used the same argument to push back against efforts for greater transparency on ticket holds, which consumer advocates say will help consumers avoid overpaying for tickets during times of price spikes. and high demand noting that there are usually thousands of tickets not even on sale yet, waiting to be listed.

The same themes were at the heart of a lengthy response Wall also wrote on behalf of Live Nation, addressing many of the questions lawmakers raised during and after January’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, where major questions were raised. raised on Live Nation’s market dominance and issues. he creates for consumers. That letter was met with an angry response from the two senators leading that hearing — Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), who urged the Justice Department to probe Live Nation as he was trying to deflect all blame.

For too long, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have wielded monopoly power in an anti-competitive way, harming fans and artists, the letter to Antitrust Division Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter reads in part. We recently held a bipartisan hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee where the chairman of Live Nation testified under oath, as did other industry players, including an artist, a marketplace ticketing company secondary school, a promoter and industry experts. The executive of Live Nations, all of the witnesses at our hearing said that Live Nation is hurting the American music industry.

We asked Live Nation a number of questions about competition both during the hearing and afterwards, but it largely failed to answer them, the senators continued. Live Nations answers come down to trusting us. We think this is completely insufficient. We appreciate your prompt attention to these matters and encourage the Antitrust Division to take action if it finds that Ticketmaster has insulated itself from competitive pressure at the expense of the industry and fans.

Naturally, Wall’s entire existence as a senior member of the Live Nation Entertainment operation is due to his expertise in antitrust and enforcement law. After all, he was a member of the legal team that prosecuted the landmark 1982 antitrust case between the United States and AT&T that forced the breakup of the telephone companies’ Bell System. He now fights alongside a company in hopes of avoiding a similar fate. It’s no different than one of the newly hired guns among Live Nation’s army of lobbyists, which Wall manages. Former U.S. Senator Mark Pryor — who authored a 2021 New York Times op-ed that argued for precisely the kind of robust antitrust enforcement lawmakers are pushing for as necessary for Wall’s business.

While antitrust laws focused on limiting corporate power and concentration, antitrust law since the 1980s has been redefined by government agencies and academics to support business growth rather than preserve competition, a wrote Pryor less than two years ago in an appeal to the Biden administration. to increase his efforts to reign in companies like Live Nation. Over the past four decades, America’s antitrust institutions like the Justice Department have eroded, a devastating trend that has unfortunately been facilitated by partisan lines. Some of the greatest failures of the past 40 years have occurred during the eight years of the Obama administration, during which the business of enforcing monopolization came to a screeching halt.

As for the actual arguments made in Wall’s latest effort to point the finger at anyone but Live Nation, he points in particular to the fact that some organizations that have pushed for pro-consumer ticketing legislation that his society hates are supported by ticket resale operations. Such efforts, he argues, constitute “astroturfing” – a practice where some people motivated by self-interest or funded by corporate money attempt to speak as if they represent the interests of consumers rather than their own. These charges ignore support for the Ticket Buyer’s Bill of Rights by groups with no interest in ticketing or ticket resale, such as the National Consumers League and the Consumer Federation of America. It’s also remarkably easy to find multiple examples of the same event in your company’s name.

Full support for Live Nation’s so-called “fair ticketing” reform program, which would effectively eliminate consumer ticket rights and make event promoters (such as Live Nation) the regulators of the entertainment, comes universally from event promoters and venue operators. The one notable exception is AEG, Live Nation’s main promotion and ticketing rival in North America, which instead puts its lobbying weight behind an effort to have venue-exclusive contracts banned. Even the recent “grassroots” effort of the “National Independent Talent Organization” made up of 45 promotion companies that are not themselves Live Nation is just another industry-supported effort from small businesses that have everything to gain from the fact that consumers have no ownership rights in the tickets they have purchased. The fact that they didn’t directly refer to the fact that their nine-point plan to reform ticketing is just a reworking of the reform package proposed by Live Nation is almost certainly to provide some perceived distance between the promotion giant and brave indies, even if their goals are exactly the same in the pushed effort.

Perhaps most egregiously, a heated argument on behalf of the artist’s right to tell consumers what they can and cannot do with the tickets they have paid for was recently made in testimony before the Georgia Legislature by David C Lowery, who also pointed out that some groups supporting ticket reform that Live Nation doesn’t want are funded by companies like StubHub or Vivid Seats. A founding member of the Cracker Group and a lecturer at the University of Georgia, Lowery is also married to Velena Vego, who happens to be Vice President of Live Nation.

Ultimately, it seems obvious that Wall and Live Nation have their messaging game plan in place and are sticking to it. “bots” are stealing tickets from consumers (although there is no evidence of this and almost no cases have been made showing that this is a real current problem in ticketing), and “scalpers” are the reason for all consumer woes. This post hasn’t pushed the needle very far so far, but it certainly makes for a decent headline, bolstered by the multimillion-dollar lobbying apparatus Wall manages on behalf of the Beverly Hills entertainment giant. .

Beyond the patchwork of laws passed or prosecuted in North America in 2023, one federal law has already been introduced – an “unwanted fee” prevention law that would also mandate the disclosure of withholdings – and others would be in progress. The question remains how well Wall and his army of well-heeled backers will be able to fend off pro-consumer reforms by muddying the waters with content like this most recent effort.

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