By Variety | Created at 2024-11-14 19:18:12 | Updated at 2024-11-25 04:19:52
1 week ago
One of the most immediate reactions to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was in Live Nation’s stock, which soared on Nov. 6 and has kept climbing, from a February low of just under $87 to nearly $130 earlier this week, despite a 6% dip in the company’s revenue for the year’s third quarter announced on Monday.
Why? Because it’s not hard to imagine that the Department of Justice’s hard-hitting lawsuit against the company and its Ticketmaster division faces much dimmer prospects in a Trump administration than a Democratic one.
The suit, filed in May, finds the DOJ suing Live Nation and Ticketmaster — North America’s biggest ticket vendor, which is fully owned by Live Nation — for violations of the Sherman antitrust act. The complaint claims that the company has a monopoly on ticketing, and that it illegally uses its power to dominate the ticketing business and quash competition, and says the two companies, which merged in 2010, should be broken up. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement at the time, “We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators. The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services.” Live Nation has disputed those claims.
Joe Berchtold, Live Nation’s chief financial officer, was cautiously optimistic about the company’s prospects in the new administration when asked during an earnings call earlier this week. “It’s still very early in the transition process, so we’re hesitant to say too much,” he said. “But absolutely, we are hopeful that we’ll see a return to the more traditional antitrust approach, where the agencies have generally tried to find ways to solve problems with targeted remedies that minimize government intervention in the marketplace. And without getting into specifics, we believe at least some parts of the case reflect a much more interventionist philosophy than you’d expect from a Republican administration. Obviously, the request to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster would be an example of that highly interventionist approach. We’ll obviously be ready to engage as soon as they are.”
While some in the concert industry assert that the lawsuit is too broadly bipartisan and too far-reaching to be quashed easily in a Trump administration, others are less certain.
A comparatively optimistic take comes from Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, who tells Variety, “We believe that the DOJ has created an overwhelming bipartisan movement to finally take action to stop the anticompetitive practices of Live Nation. Venues are suffering, fans are suffering, artists are suffering, and ultimately, when 40 state attorneys general — with more than half of them being Republican — have signed on to the DOJ’s case, it means that there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, and it means there is a desperate need by not only the industry, but by the fans and the citizens and the constituents that voted in this election to actually make sure that they’re protected, and DOJ is the only entity that can do that.”
He added, “When Donald Trump got onstage at the Republican National Convention and accepted the nomination, the first person he thanked was Kid Rock for his performance. A few months ago, Kid Rock got on a podcast and delivered a diatribe about how Live Nation’s a monopoly that hurts him and is hurting artists across the country. If artists and individuals in President-elect Trump’s orbit are speaking up about how dangerous Live Nation is for fans, and how dangerous they are for the continued existence of independent venues and promoters, it seems to me that there could be some support that this case should continue, because the work that has that has taken place thus far has been far from partisan.”
Attorney Morgan Harper of the American Civil Liberties Project (and a former U.S. Senate candidate) is more cautious, saying, “Both the prior Trump administration and — much more aggressively — the current Biden administration took enforcement action to break up Live Nation and force a change in their business model. So it seems like there’s absolutely no reason why anything should change, because of the harms that are being inflicted by this monopoly on small businesses, independent venues and consumers. But politically, how that plays out for the incoming Trump administration? Only time will tell.”
Calling the stock jump “premature,” she added, “I think there’s an assumption that a Republican administration will have less enforcement activity coming out of the DOJ, and potentially out of the government overall. So I do think that’s a bit premature, because even in the earlier Trump administration, we did see enforcement action against monopolists, including Google, not just Live Nation.”
Far more pessimistic is attorney Kristine Dennis, general counsel for ticketing company Prolific 1.
“I think Trump’s going to use the Department of Justice in a way that will take away from what it is traditionally used for — I think he is going to reallocate resources more toward his personal vendettas,” she says. “So I don’t think actual issues are going to be a priority under this particular administration. It’s probably likely that either this case will either be dropped at some point and or be stayed for the time being.”
Another source has a darker take, telling Variety, “I think there’s going to be an effort from billionaires to follow through on some of the rhetoric that was coming out of Trump, which almost amounts to, ‘The government’s for sale,’ right? But it’s not going to be that easy.”
Or will it? A rep for Live Nation’s government relations department rep tells Variety that the company did not donate to either candidate: “We have not contributed to the Presidential race this election cycle, though our PAC contributes equally to Democratic and Republican members of congress to support incumbents who recognize the importance of investment in live events to local economies across the country.”
Also, OpenSecrets shows 51 Live Nation or Ticketmaster executives contributing $5,000 or $2,000 to Congressional candidates, in total skewing slightly Democrat. However, that information is hardly definitive and money trails in Washington D.C. are among the world’s darkest highways.
“We are watching the news just like you are,” NIVA’s Parker says. “So far, this has been the way that a case is supposed to be run by the Department of Justice — there should not be news leaking. I believe the reason we’re not hearing much, other than what’s happening in the courtroom and the official DOJ press releases, is because the DOJ and the state attorneys general and the nonpartisan staff that’s helping to power this case are doing the important work of quietly and methodically collecting evidence that will help them prosecute their case.” How much that work continues — or doesn’t — under the next Trump administration remains to be seen.
