On 19 Feb, the day after a summary judgment ruling in United States v Live Nation Entertainment dismissed some of the US government’s antitrust claims against Live Nation but allowed others to proceed to trial, the live giant’s EVP of Corporate And Regulatory Affairs Dan Wall published an article on the company’s newsroom titled ‘It’s Time To Move On’.
It declared the US Department Of Justice’s legal case a “fiction”, argued that separating Live Nation from Ticketmaster - something the DoJ’s litigation sought - “would not serve any remedial purpose, let alone be a legally permissible remedy”, and demanded the government settle what remained of its antitrust lawsuit.
It was also the day of the company’s Q4 earnings call, during which executives had described the same ruling in considerably more cautious terms.
By 20 Feb, the article had been deleted. The URL now reads “This page is still in sound check”. On 22 Feb, Live Nation’s litigation counsel filed a motion seeking to delay the trial - jury selection is scheduled for 2 Mar - by appealing the very ruling Wall had just celebrated.
In the space of four days, what the company told investors, what its top regulatory executive published for public consumption, and what its lawyers filed with the court were somewhat contradictory.
A week before Wall published his article, DoJ Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater, whose team was leading on the Live Nation litigation, had been forced to resign.
Mike Davis - a Trump-aligned attorney who has reportedly advised Live Nation - responded by posting “good riddance” on social media. Wall’s article read like a more polished version of the same sentiment, padded out with case citations and an infographic. It was pulled within 24 hours.
What the company told its investors...
The central problem with Wall’s article is that it was very different in tone to what Live Nation’s own executives had told analysts about the same ruling less than 24 hours earlier.
When speaking about the trimming of the lawsuit’s scope on the Q4 earnings call, President and CFO Joe Berchtold was measured. “We were obviously very pleasantly surprised”, he said. “We never expected to get much of anything on that ruling”.
The dismissal of specific claims relating to Live Nation’s concert promotion and booking services, he added, “in our minds, really takes away the break up of the company argument” - a piece of hedging that still left room for the court and the plaintiffs to see things differently. There was no mention of settlement, no demand that the DoJ come to the negotiating table, no declaration that the case was over.
Wall’s article abandoned every one of those hedges. What Berchtold had called a pleasant surprise became, in Wall’s eyes, an inevitable outcome, because the court just axed something the company had always regarded as “implausible and improper” from the start.
And where Berchtold had treated the breakup threat as a low-probability outcome further diminished by the ruling, Wall declared it altogether dead.
He argued that the dismissal of the concert promotion claims “ends the narrative that concert promotion and ticketing are ‘mutually reinforcing monopolies’” and that what remained of the government’s case - long-term ticketing contracts, a deal with Oakview Group, and the amphitheatre rental policy - was trivial.
He then added, “None of those claims, nor even all three taken together, warrants more than standard injunctive relief”. And where Berchtold had said nothing about settlement, Wall made an explicit public demand for one, insisting the company was open to “realistic, common-sense solutions”.
Even where Wall and Berchtold were describing the same finding, they did it differently. On the call, Berchtold attributed the court’s conclusions carefully - “they determined that the promotion and booking services are not a monopoly”. Wall went much further, flatly declaring that “the claim that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are responsible for high concert ticket prices and fees was, and is, false” - a direct public denial of the central consumer harm allegation that Berchtold had been careful not to touch.
Wall’s article also included an infographic that claimed the same finding in much more bombastic terms, claiming unequivocally that “the court found no evidence that our booking practices or acquisitions harmed competition”.
What Live Nation's lawyers told the courts...
On 22 Feb, two days after Wall’s article was deleted, Live Nation’s litigation counsel - Latham & Watkins (Wall’s former firm) and Cravath, Swaine & Moore - filed a motion asking the court to refer two legal questions from the summary judgment ruling to the Second Circuit Court Of Appeals before the trial goes ahead. In effect, Live Nation is arguing that the judge got the law wrong on the legal claims that survived, and that the trial should be paused until a higher court has reviewed the ruling.
The two points at issue are whether the DoJ needs to show actual price discrimination to prove its definition of the ticketing market, and whether its claim that Live Nation restricts access to its venues to shows that are using its promotion services can proceed without a properly defined market for those promotion services. In other words, Live Nation is arguing that the two main surviving threads of the case should never have made it to trial at all.
It also argued that the district court should not empanel a jury for “a complex, month-long case when that trial (at least as currently envisioned) may well prove wholly unnecessary”.
In one sense, the motion filed by Live Nation’s lawyers supports Wall’s position in his article - both are attempts to either narrow or end the case before it reaches a jury, and both argue that the surviving claims are weaker than the DoJ believes, and that the case should be resolved without a full trial.
The problem is that, where the lawyers made this argument through the proper legal channels, Wall’s bombastic broadside was published on the company website, highlighted to investors, and used language that directly contradicted what Live Nation’s CFO had told analysts the day before.
And that, almost certainly, is why the blog post was taken down. In litigation like this it’s easy for the DoJ’s legal team to put Wall’s article next to the earnings call transcript and use the inconsistencies to undermine Live Nation’s credibility at trial.
Was the court’s decision to dismiss the concert promotion claims a “pleasant surprise” that the company never expected, as Berchtold told analysts? Or was it something the company always assumed would happen, as Wall implied in his article?
Was the prospect of an out-of-court settlement something that Wall was right to present as a foregone conclusion, writing that “cases in this posture nearly always settle” before adding that this was something Live Nation was “ready to make happen”? Or was it such a distant prospect that Berchtold did not mention it once on the entire earnings call?
And was the ruling a vindication that left nothing worth litigating, as Wall argued, or did it raise legal questions significant enough to require immediate review by the appeals courts, as the company’s own lawyers - Wall’s former colleagues - told the court two days later?Wall’s article also amounted to a public declaration that the case was effectively over - not a message likely to be well received by the judge who had just ruled that there were still significant claims that should proceed to trial, in what is already a contentious and barbed proceeding.
There’s also the question of what Wall’s article presented to investors. It was published on the company’s newsroom - and highlighted on the Investor Relations portal on the same day as the earnings call - and an investor reading it may have come away with a materially different understanding of the case’s status - and the company’s settlement posture - than one based on listening to the CFO.
What the lobbyists have been up to...
The legal filings and the deleted article sit on top of a concurrent and controversial lobbying effort that has been under way for months and has reportedly already cost the DoJ’s antitrust chief her job.
Slater’s forced resignation on 12 Feb - she had been confirmed by the US Senate less than a year earlier with 78 votes, the most bipartisan confirmation of a government appointment during Trump’s second term - prompted seven Democratic senators to write to Attorney General Pam Bondi two days later.
The letter, signed by Amy Klobuchar, Richard J Durbin, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Peter Welch, Adam B Schiff and Mazie K Hirono, demanded records of every meeting between DoJ officials and Live Nation representatives, every communication about a potential settlement, and every discussion about Slater’s dismissal. It also noted that “one prominent lobbyist for Live Nation-Ticketmaster boasted that he directly recommended the firing of Gail Slater”.
The letter also cited former DoJ deputy Roger Alford, who was fired last year amid tensions between the antitrust division’s career staff and DoJ leadership. Alford had warned that Live Nation had deployed a “bevy of cozy MAGA friends” to lobby the department. Live Nation has added Trump ally Ric Grenell to its board. Kellyanne Conway has reportedly been engaged in lobbying efforts.
Then there’s the aforementioned Mike Davis, who reportedly earned a $1 million “success fee” for helping get the DoJ to drop its challenge to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper Networks merger.
The indie venue trade body NIVA - whose members are most directly affected by the practices at issue - has accused Live Nation of attempting to “subvert the rule of law” by seeking to get the antitrust case shut down through lobbying rather than presenting its arguments in court.
New York Attorney General Letitia James was blunter: “Live Nation has used its monopoly to rig the live events industry to its benefit, driving up costs with higher ticket prices and outrageous fees. Regardless of the path that the Department Of Justice takes, my office will continue this case and we will see Live Nation in court”. Thirty-nine other state attorneys general are co-plaintiffs on the big antitrust case.
Why the man who wrote the article should have known better...
Wall’s background makes the article harder to explain away as a communications misstep. Before joining Live Nation in 2023, he spent over four decades as an antitrust litigator - including 24 years as a partner at Latham & Watkins, where he led the firm’s global antitrust practice. He had been Live Nation’s lead outside counsel for twelve years before moving in-house. He knows antitrust law as well as anyone in the country and he knows this case in particular.
Which makes one detail worth dwelling on. Wall began his career as a DoJ trial lawyer assigned to United States v AT&T - the case that broke up the Bell System in 1984. It remains the last time a US monopolisation case resulted in a forced divestiture. It is, in antitrust law, the big one.
In his article for Live Nation, Wall cited that very case to argue that break-ups almost never happen: “the last time it happened was in 1980, when AT&T agreed to be broken up”. He was on the team that did it. He is now arguing, on behalf of his employer, that it cannot be done again.
Wall’s article is part of a broader pattern at Live Nation: executives telling whatever story suits the audience in front of them, then quietly adjusting the record when it falls apart.
In March 2025, CMU revealed that Ticketmaster’s UK Managing Director Andrew Parsons had told a parliamentary committee that the company “does not change” ticket prices during checkout. On the same day, Ticketmaster’s own terms and conditions stated it could “increase or decrease” prices “at any time, based on demand” and explicitly described this as “Dynamic Pricing”.
Within two weeks, the clause had been quietly rewritten to match what Parsons had told MPs. By July, Parsons was back before the same committee - arriving fifteen minutes late with Live Nation EVP Phil Bowdery, both described by sources as “red-faced and sweaty” - to face questions about the UK Competition & Market Authority’s decision to pursue litigation against Ticketmaster over its handling of Oasis ticket sales.
Bowdery repeatedly told MPs he “did not recognise” facts about the company’s market power. The committee was not persuaded.
What the business is actually doing...
The reason all of this matters is the sheer scale of the business being protected. Live Nation's FY2025 results - published under the headline “Artist Momentum and Global Fan Passion Fueled Record-Setting 2025” - show a company that is getting bigger, faster.
Revenue hit $25.2 billion, up 9%. Operating income rose 52% to $1.3 billion. A record 159 million fans attended 55,000 shows, with international attendance exceeding the US for the first time.
The concerts division posted its best-ever margins. CEO Michael Rapino attributed this to “crafting world-class stages designed to elevate the artist’s vision”. One might also attribute it to being the only game in town for most major tours.
The scale of upcoming demand underlines the point. Harry Styles generated 11.5 million presale registrations for a single tour - standard MSG seats ranged from $219 to $674, and fans dubbed him “Greedy Styles”. Bruno Mars delivered the largest single-day ticket sales in Live Nation’s history. BTS sold out a 41-date stadium run. 67 million tickets have already been sold for 2026 shows.
This is the machine that the DoJ is arguing needs to be broken up, and it is the machine that Live Nation is spending considerable political and legal capital to keep intact.
Ticketing was the weak spot. Adjusted operating income grew just 1%, and the company’s anti-scalper measures will cost it “mid-single digits” of ticketing AOI in 2026.
Those measures were not entirely voluntary. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission sued Ticketmaster last year, accusing it of colluding with ticket touts who used illegal tactics to bulk-buy tickets for resale. Wall himself responded to a subsequent congressional letter about that litigation, calling the allegations “nonsensical” and insisting Ticketmaster’s incentives “are plainly to favour artists and fans”.
Berchtold told analysts that broker listings on Ticketmaster US had been “roughly cut in half” since the FTC action, but acknowledged the displaced tickets are likely “still being sold on the other platforms”.
In the UK, a BBC investigation subsequently found that Ticketmaster’s now-defunct British ticket resale platforms had once offered meetings to touts who were later convicted of fraud, so that they and Live Nation’s top UK lawyer could “brainstorm what more can be done by our legal team to help UK brokers”. It was a relationship that judges in the fraud cases described as “connivance and collusion”.
Former Ticketmaster employees told the BBC that despite the company claiming its UK resale platforms operated as “separate entities”, they shared infrastructure, directors and office space with Ticketmaster - meaning the company could have identified and stopped touts if it had chosen to. The brokers may have moved out of Ticketmaster’s offices, but the problem hasn’t gone away. Though, perhaps, for Ticketmaster, it’s simply a case of out of sight, out of mind.
What happens next...
Wall’s deleted article claimed that “Live Nation and Ticketmaster have led the industry in promoting reforms that artists and fans care about”. Yet in the UK, Ticketmaster resisted making voluntary commitments around primary ticketing to the CMA until it was facing litigation.
The page where Wall made his claim is, of course, “still in sound check”. But the pattern it represents - a company that says whatever it needs to, to whichever audience is in front of it, and quietly cleans up the mess afterwards - is very much live.
A company that is also very good at distraction tactics when facing regulatory scrutiny. As seen in its evolving - and geographically disparate - position on secondary ticketing.
While, in Europe, Ticketmaster bailed on for-profit ticket resale in 2018, it did then develop a capped ticket resale service on which it charges commissions. Which means it can now support new ticket touting regulations that artists and fans care about, while also benefiting commercially, because its new style resale services - while less toxic - are also conveniently regulation proof.
With Live Nation now publicly supporting ticket resale price caps in the US market, it suggests a similar strategy is being employed there. With the happy side effect that talking a lot about the need to better regulate ticket scalping can often distract lawmakers from spending too much time scrutinising the primary ticketing business.
Which is useful given it’s not just the DoJ that has raised concerns about Live Nation and Ticketmaster's market dominance, those concerns are shared by some members of Congress.
