Morgan Harper, Director of Policy & Advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, explains why there’s so much backing behind a Ticketmaster breakup.
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00:00Well, what we saw happen with the US Open Presale is a lot of what we've seen generally
00:03happen with Ticketmaster is that they become the exclusive ticketing platform for large
00:08events and they are not positioned to manage that kind of demand.
00:12And this all stems from their monopoly power.
00:14And what this all shows is we have a lot of major events, live events, both in the music,
00:20sporting industries that are using Ticketmaster as a ticketing platform.
00:24And oftentimes it's not because people who are hosting these events want to be using
00:28Ticketmaster, but it's because Ticketmaster and Live Nation, their parent company, control
00:32so many different business lines in the live events industry that a lot of other players
00:37don't have a lot of control over what kind of platform they would want to use.
00:40So even if a different ticketing platform competitor emerges, if you're not using Ticketmaster,
00:45then you might not get the event that you're looking to host that Ticketmaster, Live Nation
00:50is the concert promoter for, a certain artist that you want to appear at your venue won't
00:54be able to come because you're not playing by Live Nation and Ticketmaster's rules.
00:58But people have been complaining about Live Nation and Ticketmaster for decades.
01:01I mean, dating back to the 90s, Pearl Jam, the really big band then, tried to get around
01:06using Ticketmaster and they were shut down.
01:08And even before 2010, when Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged officially and the government
01:14approved it, you had fan advocates, artist advocates, consumer advocates that were speaking
01:20out about the dangers of allowing these companies to combine, which really brought together
01:24a dominant ticketing platform in Ticketmaster that controlled about 90% of the ticketing
01:28industry and Live Nation that controls so much, including now over 70% of the major
01:34venues in the country.
01:36People knew that you bring that together, that's game over for competition in this industry.
01:40So in many ways, it's not a surprise to see that now this DOJ and the Biden administration
01:46has brought an antitrust lawsuit against them to finally do something about this monopoly
01:49power.
01:50The question for a lot of people is, why did it take so long for the government to
01:54act and why did they approve this merger in the first place?