Yeah forcing Ticketmaster and Live Nation to unmerge, divest venues and reselling platforms, and preventing exclusive contracts with venues would be huge. Even in a very conservative interpretation of antitrust law there has clearly been an increase in prices to end consumers.
A small subset of the B2B-level customers always benefits from monopolies. But this only reduces competition in their own markets... in this case the limited set of musicians and record labels who succeed via special treatment by Ticketmaster's monopoly.
Ultimately it harms more musicians/labels than it benefits. Especially in the long run.
This shows that monopolies not only harm their own markets but plenty of sub-markets as well.
The influence successful companies have on gov policy-making is one of the best arguments against ever more specialized gov intervention in markets. The best solution is gov policy that shuts down anti-competitive behaviour full-stop.
Not creating specialized 200+ page bills that can be exploited by the big players (see how Dodd-Frank resulted in only 5 mega-banks controlling a market while tons of small/medium banks shut down due to their unrealistic requirements) - which is often what's pushed both by politicians and inadvertently by the public who buy into false narratives about punishing corporate greed.
I will sell tickets for your band/venue at whatever price you want, declare x% of the price a "fee," and give most of the fee back to you. I'll happily be the punching bag, but it won't work. Your fans will be upset with you, not me, for choosing a podunk, unheard of ticket seller that charges egregious fees.
The only reason why your band is going to choose Ticketmaster over my is because Ticketmaster already controls the market.
No. You physically can not run a major (arena/stadium) tour without using live nation. They own or have cross deals with the production company, venue, etc. Even pre-merger they had their hands in many many many pies. Its not just ubiquity of the ticketing.
Im 10-15 years out if date, but no. When I was friends with MPA/CAA touring folks no one was pro live nation or ticket master. They were at best a necessary evil that you dealt with in order to get market/venue access. Everyone was moving to make money on merch and direct sales. And that was before the bigger consolidations and “resale marketplace” grift of the past decade.
I'm not crossing my fingers for much, but anything they do at this point would be awesome.