Democrat members of Congress were scathing yesterday about Donald Trump and his Department Of Justice in a Congressional session on the Live Nation antitrust case.
The DoJ sued Live Nation in 2024, accusing the live giant of anticompetitive conduct and seeking to split up the company’s venue and concerts business from its Ticketmaster subsidiary.
But after Live Nation hired close allies of Trump to lobby on its behalf, the DoJ settled the case just as it got to trial back in March this year.
According to Senator Chuck Schumer, that was a “sweetheart settlement” that saw Team Trump side with “an illegal monopoly whose employees bragged about robbing fans blind”.
Despite the DoJ’s settlement, 33 US states who were also involved in the litigation ploughed on with the case, with a jury ultimately concluding that Live Nation and Ticketmaster do indeed operate an illegal monopoly.
The court is yet to decide what sanctions Live Nation should now face. In the DoJ settlement the company agreed to some nominal changes to its operations to address competition concerns and to pay out in the region of $280 million in damages.
But Live Nation’s critics are calling for the court to force much more substantial changes to the way the company operates. That includes the original demand to split up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which originally came together into one business via a 2010 merger.
Senators at yesterday’s session echoed those demands. According to Ticket News, Schumer insisted that “another slap on the wrist isn’t going to be enough - we need to break up the monopoly”.
Meanwhile Representative Jamie Raskin said, “if the structure of Live Nation Ticketmaster virtually guarantees anti-competitive conduct, then structural remedies must obviously be on the table, including divestiture, including break-up. The remedy must address the scope and the magnitude of the violation”.
Congress members also heard from one of the state-level Attorneys General that proceeded with the legal case against Live Nation, California’s Rob Bonta, and a former employee of the DoJ’s antitrust division, Roger Alford.
There were also representatives of the music industry, with independent venue owners Tom DeGeorge of The Crowbar in Tampa and Jerry Mickelson of Jam Productions in Chicago, plus musician Franz Nicolay, keyboardist and pianist with The Hold Steady.
Attorney General Bonta told Congress members how the DoJ antitrust team suddenly stopped communicating with state-level legal officers as the trial approached, before then announcing that a settlement had been agreed. “They bailed” he said, adding “they left us hanging, they burned all the trust”.
Alford, who was pushed out of his job in the DoJ antitrust team in July 2025, was also very critical of his former employer which, he said, “abused its prosecutorial discretion” by reaching a settlement after Live Nation’s Trump allies piled on the political pressure. As a result, he said, “the rule of law” became “the rule of lobbyists”.