While the U.S. Open presale debacle drew criticism from tennis fans, issues with Ticketmaster’s dominance in the live events industry is not new. Morgan Harper, director of policy & advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, joined TheStreet to discuss the company’s monopolistic practices and the need for government action.
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Full Video Transcript Below:
MORGAN HARPER: Well, what we saw happen with the U.S. Open presale is a lot of what we’ve seen generally happen with Ticketmaster is that they become the exclusive ticketing platform for large events and they are not positioned to manage that kind of demand. And this all stems from their monopoly power. And what this all shows is we have a lot of major events, live events, both in the music sporting industries that are using Ticketmaster as a ticketing platform.
And oftentimes it’s not because people who are hosting these events want to be using Ticketmaster, but it’s because Ticketmaster and Live Nation, their parent company, control so many different business lines in the live events industry that a lot of other players don’t have a lot of control over what kind of platform they would want to use. So even if a different ticketing platform competitor emerges, if you’re not using Ticketmaster, then you might not get the event that you’re looking to host that. Ticketmaster Live Nation is the concert promoter for a certain artist that you want to appear at. Your venue won’t be able to come because you’re not playing by live nation Ticketmaster’s rules.
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But people have been complaining about live nation Ticketmaster for decades. I mean, dating back to the 90s Pearl Jam really big band then tried to get around using Ticketmaster and they were shut down. And even before 2010, when Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged officially and the government approved it, you had fan advocates, artists advocates, consumer advocates that were speaking out about the dangers of allowing these companies to combine, which really brought together a dominant ticketing platform and Ticketmaster that controlled about 90% of the ticketing industry and live nation that controls so much, including now over 70% of the major venues in the country.
People knew that. You bring that together. That’s game over for competition in this industry. So in many ways, it’s it’s not a surprise to see that now this DOJ and the Biden administration has brought an antitrust lawsuit against them to finally do something about this monopoly power. The question for a lot of people is why did it take so long for the government to act and why they approved this merger in the first place.
