The phone call lasted long enough to matter. In 2021, John Abbamondi, then CEO of the Brooklyn Nets and the Barclays Center, chose a ticketing company other than Ticketmaster for the arena. What followed, according to testimony at trial, was a recorded call between Abbamondi and Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino that a courtroom heard described as adversarial and “expletive-laden.” Abbamondi told the jury he interpreted a comment from Rapino as a “veiled threat — maybe not-so-veiled threat” that Live Nation would route fewer concerts to the Barclays Center because of the switch.
That call surfaced during a trial that, by the time it ended, had run less than a week. The U.S. Department of Justice and Live Nation reached a tentative settlement before proceedings could go much further.
What the Settlement Offers
According to the announcement, the deal would require Live Nation to pay a fine of up to $280 million and divest at least 13 venues, with the intent of giving competitors more room to operate. The company says it sold over 646 million tickets last year and produced more than 54,000 events internationally. It owns 150 venues in the United States and invested $1 billion last year to build an additional 18 live-music venues.
That scale is precisely the problem, according to critics of the deal.
New York Attorney General Letitia James did not hold back. “The settlement recently announced with the U.S. Department of Justice fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case, and would benefit Live Nation at the expense of consumers,” she said in a statement. “We cannot agree to it.”
She was not alone. Twenty-six of the 30 state attorneys general who had joined the DOJ’s lawsuit chose to side with James and continue pursuing the case independently. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said the settlement “does not adequately remedy” the situation for concertgoers, adding that Live Nation had “raked in billions from a monopoly that has made it harder for consumers to see the artists they love.”
A Merger That Reshaped an Industry
Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010. Since then, the combined entity has controlled the majority of ticket sales and venue bookings across the country. Artists have had little practical choice but to work within that system. Fans have faced dynamic pricing that can push ticket costs up by thousands of dollars, often without any input from the performers themselves.
The frustration reached a visible peak during ticket sales for Taylor Swift‘s Eras tour, when the buying process became so chaotic and widely reported that it drew direct government attention and helped accelerate the antitrust case.
With 26 state attorneys general continuing their lawsuit and the DOJ’s settlement still described as tentative, the legal fight over Live Nation’s market position is far from resolved. The fine gets paid. The 13 venues get divested. The monopoly, as James frames it, stays intact.
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