The settlement, first reported Monday by Politico, would require big concessions from Live Nation including opening Ticketmaster’s platform to rivals, limiting how it uses exclusive deals with venues, and selling several amphitheaters. Live Nation would also pay more than $200 million to 40 states involved in the case.
But crucially, it would not require the company to divest Ticketmaster, the giant ticketing platform Live Nation acquired in a 2010 merger that has sparked monopoly gripes ever since. When the DOJ filed its case in 2024, it said breaking up the two companies was the ultimate goal of the lawsuit.
Read the rest at source: https://www.billboard.com/pro/live-nation-doj-settlement-states-continue-fight/
The one outstanding feature I know, personally, about Live Nation is they are not about the music, the fans, the artists or their own people. They are about the bottom line, a construct of their imagined vacations, cashing in on options and balancing shares. LN occupies an apex of the MB (music business), like the topper on the baseball bat. Every ribbon on the Music Production Maypole is held by their interests or related combinations of interests. Money coming in from every degree on the protractor. Price control, seating control, event control, security, maintenance, and finally staging. My job as a stagehand/carpenter/pusher was to help 5-100 other people setup concerts and other large and small events in live event venues of all kinds. Mostly, we pushed giant boxes of equipment on and off trucks at maximum speed, plugged it in without damage and then tore it all down (strike) later without getting hurt or hurting someone else, unless they were a real asshole.
Rarely did I work on the shipping floor for one of these big music events companies. Usually, I was backstage/under-stage and FOH to prepare the venue. Long story short, as soon as I got my access code to the employees-only door at the equipment warehouse, Live Nation pulled the pin on the music industry. Live Nation had caught the Mind-Virus along with all the other corporate apex dwellers, taking commands from their betters, and began to enforce unsolicited medical procedures on their legions of payment vectors, including employees, customers (attendees), suppliers (me), and even artists (many of them now dead or dying).
From way, way, way at the top of the music biz pyramid, among the clouds, real, imagined and artificial, I, on the shipping floor, loading another 53′ trailer with stage and audio gear received their message, straight into my ear via loudspeaker and the eyes of the LN rep who I’d seen earlier in the day walking the floor. His pupils were black angry orbs staring from under his deerstalker, looking me up and down and then turning away in a big, faggy huff. Within 5 minutes all production was stopped and we were told to unload the gear and then… go home, because… we were all fired. When the word came down that the million dollar deposit cheque bounced and the venue was no longer available, the business was instantly bankrupt. The corporate awards show we had been loading onto the trucks for two days had to come off. This was March 2020.
I had other event companies I was working for. One was still operating but the stagehand job wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the termination of employment that stung. That was nothing new. It was the total ban on anyone working without a mask. And then further, a ban on anyone working backstage without a shot, and then two shots. There was no way out of the chute they had put all of the workers into. While they couldn’t force you at gunpoint to meet their demands, they could just let you go. And that’s what happened.
This kind of employment injustice on such a broad scale could only take place on orders from the top. In the case of the events industry, that would be Live Nation. As flunkies for the globalist order, they thoughtlessly ruined thousands of livelihoods and contributed greatly to the ongoing demise of the music industry. But that’s another song.