John Abbamondi had a simple description of the voices on the recording: “the nervous guy was me and the angry guy was Michael.”
That audio, a public exhibit played for jurors during the first week of trial, captures a 2021 phone call between Abbamondi, then-CEO of Barclays Center, and Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino. The subject was a ticketing contract. The tension was something else entirely.
Abbamondi had called to deliver news that Barclays planned to leave Ticketmaster for rival platform SeatGeek. The recording, obtained and published by a media outlet, picks up partway through the exchange — after the announcement had already landed. What follows is an argument over when exactly the existing contract was set to expire, with both sides holding different positions on the timeline.
The Line That Became Exhibit A
Near the end of the call, around the 4:14 mark, Rapino pointed to “a new venue in town” — a reference Abbamondi understood to mean UBS Arena, located near Queens. Rapino’s words, according to the transcript that had previously been posted to the court docket: “What I’ve told you from day one was, it was going to be a tough time to deliver tickets or concerts with a new competitor in town, regardless of ticketing.”
Abbamondi testified that he took this as “a maybe not-so-veiled threat that it would be difficult for them to put concerts at Barclays Center” if the arena stopped working with Ticketmaster.
Rapino and Abbamondi heard the same words differently. That gap is exactly where the government’s antitrust case lives.
What the Case Comes Down To
The Justice Department filed suit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, alleging the company used its dominance across concert promotion, venue ownership, and ticketing to squeeze out competition. The federal case has since settled, with the company avoiding a breakup, according to the announcement. Dozens of states are pressing forward with their own version of the trial, which could resume as soon as the coming weeks.
The Barclays call sits near the center of that litigation. Prosecutors framed Rapino’s comment as evidence of coercion — that Live Nation wielded its control over concert bookings as leverage to keep venues locked into Ticketmaster contracts. The defense’s position, implicit in the framing of the exchange as a “reality check,” is that Rapino was simply describing market conditions, not issuing a warning.
A transcript had already been in the public record. The audio changes the texture of the conversation — the pace, the register, the weight behind the words. Jurors heard it. Now it’s public.
Photo by Noura Zaher on Pexels
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
