Ticketmaster set to appear in US federal court in monopoly trial
Messages from a 2022 Slack chat show two regional directors for ticketing at Live Nation, a company merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, bragging about raising fees for festival and concert goers, highlighting industry price gouging, as the firm readies up for monopoly lawsuit.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation are currently embroiled in a large-scale anti-trust case, featuring court documents released detailing messages between regional leaders joking about “gouging” fans for massive fees and parking prices.
In an exchange from 2022, one staff member states that ticket prices were “F*cking outrageous” whilst another bragged about parking for VIP sections reaching $250, quoting “Robbing them blind baby, that’s how we do”.
The exchange also admitted to purposeful gouging of ancillary prices, extras like parking and upgrade fees, to make up revenue, all at the cost of the concert goer.
The company claims the stack comments from the regional directors were “a private exchange from a junior employee and do not reflect how Ticketmaster operates or meets their company values”.
The current scene of even larger artists struggling to get fans to afford tickets, as well as venues being under strain has been exacerbated by these types of predatory pricing techniques from the $22bn company
The US Department of Justice sued the company on monopolistic practices in 2024, through their widespread control of concert ticketing and promotion, as well as their widespread venue contracting.
Ticketmaster, Live Nation and their festival ticketer Front Gate Tickets have faced multiple other lawsuits. In 1994, grunge rock band Pearl Jam unsuccessfully sued Ticketmaster on antitrust grounds, alleging that the company had bought its major competitors and abused its marketplace dominance.
Consumers urged policymakers to address the abusive monopoly again in 2022, after a crash during presale for Taylor Swift’s tour that year. A group of fans filed a lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster and Live Nation of fraud, antitrust violations and price-fixing.
Ticketmaster controls over 70% of the ticketing and live events market across the US and around 60% in the UK sector. Abuse of demand-based pricing which causes ticket prices to fluctuate in real time, similar to a stock market drew immense scrutiny from UK competition authorities, particularly during the 2024 Oasis reunion ticket sales, labelled “the great rock ’n’ roll ripoff”.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has investigated practices by Ticketmaster in 2025. The CMA forced the company to alert fans 24 hours in advance of tiered pricing use, alert fans of price changes during online queues and cease their use of misleading ticketing labels.
It seems that with struggling artists at all levels of the industry, the global cost of living rising higher and the ongoing concert monopoly, it is more difficult than ever to push through. However, our most recent episode of Line-In Network Podcast talks in detail at early artist tips for concert and event revenues and the working with the reality.
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