When Live Nation’s epic DOJ antitrust trial finally kicked off this week, it didn’t disappoint, featuring strongly-worded opening statements, a battle over a botched Taylor Swift presale, and claims of a “threat” against a Brooklyn venue if it dropped Ticketmaster.
You’re reading Billboard’s weekly Live Nation trial recap, a weekly one-sheet of everything that happened in the Department of Justice’s monopoly case against the concert giant. Stay tuned here each Friday for all the testimony and big events you might have missed.
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WHAT HAPPENED: Nearly two years after the DOJ accused Live Nation of holding an illegal monopoly over live music, the two sides finally went before a jury, kicking off a trial that’s expected to last roughly six weeks and could have huge implications for the concert business.
In opening statements to the jury on Tuesday (March 3), DOJ lawyer David Dahlquist said that the concert industry is “broken” and “controlled by Live Nation.” Firing back for Live Nation was David Marriott, who said the government had “cherry-picked” evidence to support such claims in an industry that’s “more competitive than ever before.”
A key point of contention was the infamous 2022 presale for Swift’s Eras Tour, which saw widespread outages and sparked backlash against Ticketmaster. The DOJ told jurors it was evidence Live Nation has no incentive for good customer service: “Their technology is held together by duct tape.” Live Nation defended itself by saying the incident was caused by cyberattacks and unprecedented traffic, and that nobody could have handled it better.
WHO TESTIFIED: The government’s first witness was John Abbamondi, former CEO of the owner of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, who testified Wednesday that Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino threatened to withhold major artists if the venue switched from Ticketmaster to rival ticketer SeatGeek, Bloomberg reports.
The feds played a recording of a phone call in which Rapino told Abbamondi that it would be “tough to deliver concerts” to Barclays if it dropped Ticketmaster, and that he might be forced to send them to the nearby UBS Arena on Long Island — statements Abbamondi said he understood as a “threat.”
When Barclays did eventually go with SeatGeek, Abbamondi said the venue saw acts diverted to other arenas, including a Billie Eilish concert that went to UBS Arena, according to Courthouse News: “We saw a dramatic decline in shows booked at the arena,” he said.
On cross-examination by Marriott, Abbamondi admitted he didn’t know why Eilish had gone elsewhere, and acknowledged other Barclays execs had qualms about SeatGeek. Live Nation’s lawyer also pressed Abbamondi on his personal ties to SeatGeek, getting him to say he has many “friends and colleagues” at the ticketing company.
SeatGeek’s own founder, Jack Groetzinger, took the stand later in the week, telling jurors that the company offers “retaliation insurance” to venues fearful of Live Nation’s wrath, Bloomberg reports. But in a heated cross-examination, Marriott painted Groetzinger as a self-interested competitor who had helped spark the lawsuit. According to Inner City Press, Marriott at one point cited an email in which a Barclays exec said she was concerned about “perception issues” with SeatGeek’s technology and practices.
Other witnesses this week included AEG Presents CEO Jay Marciano; Marc Geiger of Gate 52, a services platform for indie venues; Mitch Helgerson, chief revenue officer at the NHL’s Minnesota Wild; and concert promoter/venue owner Seth Hurwitz.
Hurwitz, who previously fought his own legal battle with Live Nation, complained about the company’s industry dominance, according to Bloomberg, but said he’d never been threatened and actually credited Ticketmaster’s performance: “They do a great job.”
WHY IT MATTERS: One of the DOJ’s two key claims is that Live Nation coerces venues into using Ticketmaster, both through the use of long-term exclusive contracts and with threats to divert concerts elsewhere. The Barclays incident is one of their primary alleged examples of this — a case where the venue was allegedly not only threatened overtly, but objectively saw fewer concerts and was forced to crawl back to Ticketmaster.
The feds want Abbamondi and Groetzinger’s testimony to help jurors believe that argument, but Live Nation will be hoping that the cross-exams had the opposite effect, painting two crucial government witnesses as unreliable voices with ulterior motives.
