Ticketmaster Finally Faces Accountability For Being A Shitty Monopoly (Maybe)

Way back in 1994 you might recall that Pearl Jam cancelled their summer tour because they, just wee tots at the time, very clearly realized that TicketMaster held an illegal monopoly over concert tickets, screwing consumers and competitors alike with broad restrictions and high prices.

Everybody knew this to be true for the decades to follow, but because U.S. antitrust enforcement is so pathetic, and the country so painfully corrupt, it took more than three decades for Ticketmaster to be held accountable. Maybe.

A few weeks ago a jury found that Ticketmaster operates an illegal monopoly over event tickets in the United States. An announcement by NY AG Letitia James (and the 33 other attorneys general that joined their suit) doesn't pull any punches:

"The jury today found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable for violating federal and state laws by engaging in anticompetitive conduct. The jury found that Ticketmaster unlawfully maintains a monopoly in the market for ticketing services at major concert venues. The jury also found that Live Nation has a monopoly in the market for large amphitheaters used by artists and that Live Nation unlawfully requires artists who use the amphitheaters it owns to also use its event promotion services. In addition, the jury determined that fans have been overcharged for concert tickets at major concert venues across the country."

Evidence presented at trial included a Live Nation/Ticketmaster regional director boasting of “robbing them blind” with fees for ancillary services like parking, which can add hundreds of additional dollars to the bill. The fight now heads to a bench trial to determine what remedies Ticketmaster will face for operating a generational monopoly, which can range from fines to a potential breakup.

The state AGs won despite the fact that the Trump DOJ fired anybody in the administration with even the slightest antitrust credibility, then struck a piddly closed door settlement with Live Nation and Ticketmaster last month, leaving state partners high and dry right in the middle of their legal campaign.

The public interest was lucky things worked out.

MAGA wants to take credit for the Ticketmaster win, despite the fact that Trump corruption almost destroyed it.

There are a few folks buried within Trumpism that believe that antitrust reform is a good idea, even though they're not particularly consistent about it. They'll argue on one end that U.S. antitrust reform needs shaping up, then somehow downplay corruption, or help dismantle regulatory independence and autonomy, leading to greater power for monopoly via hollow free market platitudes.

Gail Slater was one of these folks. She's a die hard MAGA zealot who believes in a lot of the worst excesses of Trumpism, but she also moonlights as an antitrust reformer. Trump has openly exploited Slater, and folks like her, to give himself phony populist antitrust credibility in the press for years.

Surprise: that credibility wound up being a lie and corruption dominated all administration decision making and policy. Who could have predicted it.

Certain Trump MAGA loyalists and lobbyists, more loyal to corporate power (like Mike Davis), managed to get Slater fired from her job as antitrust boss at the DOJ last February. From a recent report in the Wall Street Journal:

“A Journal investigation found that Davis pushed antitrust officials at the Justice Department to approve his deals—and he went over their heads when they wouldn’t comply, according to interviews with more than three dozen DOJ employees, lobbyists, lawyers and others familiar with the antitrust division.”

Slater wrote this strange editorial over at Rolling Stone about Ticketmaster that reads like a sort of victory lap. She wanders around the map a lot, whining a little about socialism, downplaying the Trump administration's failure in the case, and correctly pointing out that antitrust reform has broad bipartisan appeal.

But she also paints a picture of a U.S. that doesn't really exist:

"Why, despite all these odds, did this happen? I believe it is because antitrust is a common sense, 80/20 issue for Americans. We invented antitrust, and we are innately good at it. You could say it’s baked into our DNA.  Americans believe in fairness, free markets, and capitalism, or at least most of us do. But how do we keep our markets from tilting to monopoly and oligopoly? You guessed it: We enforce our century-old antitrust laws."

Except we're not good at it. This is weird delusion.

While antitrust reform is certainly popular with the public, our regulators and policymakers have generally been too corrupt to function on the subject for some time. Which is why the U.S. is awash with monopolistic predation, and it took thirty-plus years for Ticketmaster to be held accountable.

It's important to note: we're still not sure this doesn't just end with a pathetic fine Ticketmaster and Live Nation lawyers argue down to a pittance.

Republicans openly coddle monopoly at nearly every turn across nearly every major U.S. industry (tech, telecom, insurance, medical care, eyewear, energy, airlines). They've never really been subtle about this, yet they're still given endless, unearned credibility on the subject of antitrust in our broken corporate press.

At the same time, Democrats get into office, put on a good show about cracking down on corporate power, but routinely wind up tripping over their own ass.

Recall that the Obama DOJ approved the Ticketmaster Live Nation merger, leaning on conditions nobody seriously enforced. Democrats also love to propose convoluted band aid solutions that don't strike at the heart of the monopoly dysfunction (the Biden FCC was good at this sort of decorative stuff), lest it upset campaign contributors.

Widespread U.S. corruption ensures real corporate power reform rarely arrives, and when it does, tends to be either highly theatrical or decidedly impermanent.

Slater's editorial is correct in that there's potential for real antitrust reform to be a bipartisan affair, but she floats over all the terrible shit Trump has done to prevent this from happening:

Because antitrust is an 8/20 issue for Americans, it by definition defies partisanship. For those of us interested in governing and not bickering, this is a good thing. Some issues call for us to be partisan. Antitrust does not. The winning state-AG coalition in the Live Nation case is living proof of this. The AGs applied common sense to the cards that were dealt when the DOJ dropped out, and worked together as Americans to fight on for consumers in both red and blue states. In so doing, they proved that a Teneessee or Texas trial lawyer can effectively connect with a Manhattan jury over a common interest in free, fair, and competitive markets. No one needed a Ph.D in economics to read those Slack messages, after all; as my husband says, “People kinda know when they are getting screwed.”

Again there's bipartisan public support for antitrust reform. And the state win on Ticketmaster is a lovely example of bipartisan collaboration. But it came despite federal Republicans doing everything in their power to not just eviscerate this case, but to dismantle regulatory corporate oversight entirely.

Last election season the Trump administration took advantage of the public's abject frustration at unchecked corporate power, promising that Trump would finally be the one to set things right. But as I warned repeatedly that was always a con parroted by lazy media outlets and a broad assortment of useful idiots (including purported "progressive" antitrust expert Matt Stoller).

If we're going to be remotely honest about any of this, the conversation has to start with the fact that federal Republicans are currently some of the most radical, corrupt politicians to ever set foot in DC. With America's history of pay-to-play governance, that's truly saying something.

The federal GOP is utterly irredeemable. And despite the claims of folks like Slater and Stoller (see Stoller's pre-insurrection love of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley) these are not people you can meaningfully form meaningful partnerships on antitrust reform on, because their populist platitudes are utterly hollow.

We saw this most pointedly from 2020-2025, when the Trump populists claimed they were keen on "cracking down on big tech," only for the second Trump administration to result in a corrupt authoritarian corporatist alliance so deep our tech oligarchs went full mask off as technofascist sociopaths, doubling and tripling down on their worst impulses (Stoller has memory holed his enabling of this).

With the federal government now too corrupt to function and federal regulators fighting for their very survival, the onus will consistently fall to a coalition of outfunded and outgunned states to engage in any sort of meaningful accountability for U.S. corporate power run amok.

That is going to be a theme you will see a lot in the months and years to come, and it's very much going to be an inconsistent work in progress. The press downplays or ignores this, but it's important to reckon with the fact that we no longer have a federal government that functions in the public interest.

The lobotomization of the federal government through corruption is going to have profound and lasting generational impact in ways we can't even begin to imagine. Someday we might have a federal government capable of the responsibility as Gail wistfully suggests, but that's certainly not the reality we inhabit today.

That what passes for a functional government occasionally still does the right thing is certainly a nice treat worth celebrating, but it doesn't justify the delusion that the U.S. hasn't been hollowed out like a pumpkin by the extraction class.