There are two primary threats to the future of live entertainment that the US government needs to tackle according to the country’s National Independent Venue Association: an “unregulated secondary ticketing market” and “Live Nation’s vertically integrated monopoly”.
Therefore, the trade group says in a submission to the government’s ongoing review of the American ticketing market, the Trump administration should do two things: introduce and enforce tough new regulation targeting tickets touts and scalpers, while also forcing the “structural divestiture of Live Nation into four separate companies: ticketing, promotion, advertising/sponsorship and artist management”.
“The current system is rigged against fans, artists and independent stages”, says NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker. To truly fix the system, he adds, the US government needs to do something dramatic, rather than just getting modest commitments from Live Nation and introducing some nominal regulation of resale. We need, “real structural change”, he insists, which means “decisive action to break up Live Nation and rein in the deceptive practices that dominate ticket resale”.
Live Nation has made its own submission to the ticketing consultation that was launched by the US Department Of Justice and Federal Trade Commission back in May. Needless to say, it argues that the only area where more regulation is needed is in tackling those unscrupulous scalpers. Both Live Nation and NIVA say it’s time to formally force a price cap onto the unofficial resale of tickets, though the live giant thinks that should be set at 20%, while the indie venue trade group opts for 10%.
The DoJ and FTC launched their consultation on the US ticketing business in response to an executive order from Trump that said American regulators should “ensure that competition laws are appropriately enforced in the concert and entertainment industry”.
The DoJ would presumably argue it is already doing that by suing Live Nation and pursuing litigation that seeks to reverse the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. That legal action began on Biden’s watch, of course, and some predicted that a Trump-led DoJ would be less keen to see it to completion. However, for now at least, the litigation continues to go through the motions.
In recent years, Live Nation has sought to respond to criticism in Washington by focusing on secondary ticketing. Even though Ticketmaster is more actively involved in unofficial ticket resale in the US than it is in Europe, it would still rather regulation be ramped up on that side of the business. Live Nation’s public support for an actual price cap is more recent, though that may be because the live giant wants to be the entity that facilitates the capped resale of tickets through its main Ticketmaster platform.
According to Variety, Live Nation’s support for a 20% resale price cap is included in its submission to the DoJ and FTC. It also wants new rules to give artists more control over the resale of their tickets and a more proactive crackdown on scalpers who use special software - or bots - to hoover up tickets for in-demand events, something which is already illegal under US-wide federal law.
In its submission, NIVA calls for additional scalping regulation. That includes a strong ban on speculative selling, which is when scalpers advertise for sale tickets they are yet to secure. The TICKET Act currently working its way through US Congress also bans speculative selling, but includes an exception for companies offering “concierge” or “procurement” services, which is entirely different to ticket scalping, or just ticket scalping by a different name, depending on your viewpoint.
As far as NIVA is concerned, the exception for concierge services in the TICKET Act is a loophole that will render the ban on speculative selling useless, because scalpers will be able to speculatively list tickets on resale platforms providing they describe that activity using a “trendy name”. Therefore the speculative selling ban should apply across the board with no exceptions.
Live Nation could probably live with these additional ticket scalping regulations but - obviously - will strongly oppose any proposal that it divest some of its businesses.
However, says NIVA, having one company be so dominant across the live music ecosystem - in tour promotion, venue management, ticketing, sponsorship and even artist management - is the real issue. When Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, the live giant agreed with the DoJ certain restrictions regarding how the different strands of the business interact, which were then set out in a ‘consent decree’.
But that approach hasn’t worked, NIVA insists. “The conflicts of interest inherent in one company operating across all of these roles are too great and too systemic to be addressed through regulatory conditions alone”, it writes in its submission to the DoJ and FTC. “True remedy requires structural divestment to dismantle the flywheel and ensure no single entity controls the entire live event pipeline”.