Live Nation doubled lobbying spending to $2.4M in 2023 amid antitrust threat

Live Nation Entertainment more than doubled its federal lobbying spending to $2.4 million in 2023 from $1.1 million in 2022 as it navigated legislative and regulatory efforts to break up its power in the live entertainment and ticketing industry.

The lobbying blitz comes on the heels of the infamous Taylor Swift “Eras Tour” presale that crashed Ticketmaster in November 2022, which prompted congressional scrutiny of the ticket vendor’s parent company.

Critics argue the dominance of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in the live entertainment and ticketing industry has led to higher ticket prices, enormous fees and poor consumer experiences like the botched presale.

“Live events are about bringing people together and making lifelong memories, but unfair business practices from the biggest players in this market are putting these experiences out of reach for many Americans,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, told The Hill.

Live Nation has argued that there is robust competition in the concert promotion space, particularly in the secondary ticketing market, and pointed to a “large gap” in quality between Ticketmaster’s ticketing services and its closest competitors on a national and global scale.

“Live Nation developed a business model that allows it to serve everyone in the live entertainment ecosystem — especially artists, venues and fans — better than anyone else. It is not anticompetitive to do that,” Dan Wall, executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs for Live Nation, told The Hill.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster are the biggest players across large swathes of the live entertainment industry, from ticketing to event promotion to venue operations.

A June report by the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an anti-monopoly nonprofit, found that Live Nation operates 64 percent of the top venues in the country, 78 percent of which use Ticketmaster for ticketing services.

During a discussion with the AELP last Tuesday, Klobuchar described Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s dominance in ticketing, venues and talent promotion as “one big triple monopoly” and called on Congress to pass “targeted legislative solutions” to help rival ticketing companies compete in the marketplace.

The entertainment giant has hired three new lobbying firms and their influential brokers to work on legislation and regulations impacting the ticketing industry, including former Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, former general counsel to the Senate antitrust subcommittee Seth Bloom of Bloom Strategies and veteran lobbyist Jennifer Stewart of Stewart Strategies and Solutions.

“It’s no secret we’ve stepped up our advocacy efforts this past year. More than ever, Congress is focused on ticketing policies, and there is an unprecedented amount of lobbying going on by ticket resellers and competitors attempting to use legislation to protect ticket scalping and deceptive sales practices to advance their own competitive interests,” Wall said. 

There are areas of common ground between legislators and Live Nation on proposed changes to the live entertainment landscape.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last January, Live Nation President and Chief Financial Officer Joe Berchtold said the company welcomed reforms that would expand prohibitions barring bots from purchasing tickets, crack down on deceptive resale tactics and implement upfront pricing of tickets, known as “all-in pricing.”

Last June, ticket sellers including Ticketmaster and SeatGeek agreed to adopt all-in pricing rather than hit customers with hidden fees at checkout. The move was a win for President Biden’s efforts to crack down on “junk fees” across industries.

Live Nation has also supported the introduction of the Fans First Act, which the company and Brownstein disclosed lobbying on, by Klobuchar and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in December. The bill would implement a slew of changes including ticket pricing transparency, cracking down on illegal ticket sales and banning bots from buying tickets.

A cohort of entertainment industry players including Eventbrite, Fix the Tix Coalition and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have also endorsed the bill.

“While this bill will be a big step toward protecting consumers from predatory ticketing practices, we also need more competition in online ticketing,” Klobuchar told the Hill.

She pointed to the Unlock Ticketing Markets Act she introduced with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), which would tap the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to block “excessively long exclusive” contracts they say block competitors, decrease incentives to innovate and increase costs.

“What we’re seeing is Live Nation starting to create an ecosystem just like we’ve seen with a lot of the big tech companies using its power in one area to foreclose competition in another area,” said Kathleen Bradish, acting president at the American Antitrust Institute and former assistant chief and international counsel in the antitrust division of the Justice Department, during a discussion with AELP last Tuesday.

Live Nation’s hired guns have not disclosed lobbying on the Unlock Ticketing Markets Act, but they have disclosed working on other bills introduced in the wake of the Eras Tour presale. Those bills include the BOSS and Swift Act, which would require ticket sellers to be transparent about ticket pricing, distribution and refund policies, and the Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing Act, which would tap the FTC to enforce all-in pricing and bar speculative ticketing.

Live Nation is also facing a series of investigations. In November, a Senate panel issued a subpoena for documents that could provide insight into Live Nation’s practices related to ticket pricing, fees and resale. The Department of Justice, which approved Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2010, also reportedly opened an investigation into whether Live Nation violated anti-monopoly rules before the Eras Tour presale.

Amid heightened scrutiny, the concert industry had its strongest year on record, rebounding after a pandemic-induced industry crisis. According to the trade publication Pollstar, gross ticket sales for the top 100 global tours climbed to $9.2 billion in 2023, up 46 percent from record-setting 2022 sales. 

Ticket prices have also skyrocketed in recent years, particularly on the resale market. The average concert ticket cost in 2023 was $116.23 as of a June analysis by Pollstar, up from $92.42 in 2019. The average resale ticket price had doubled to $252 from $125 in 2019, according to SeatGeek.

A variety of factors cause ticket prices to fluctuate, although changes in price are primarily driven by supply and demand. And there was a lot of demand for blockbuster tours, including Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, which coincided with the resurgence of the live entertainment industry after the pandemic.

Demand is only expected to grow, shining a spotlight on legislative and regulatory efforts that could reshape the live entertainment landscape. PwC’s “Global Entertainment & Media Outlook,” released in June 2023, forecasted that annual live music revenue would hit $9.5 billion last year and could hit $10.5 billion by 2027.

“We’ve had to step up to the challenge as a voice for ourselves and the industry, working closely with our artist and team allies. We will continue to do so as long as it’s necessary,” Wall said.