The Department of Justice is suing to break up LiveNation-Ticketmaster, accusing it of abusing market power and inflating ticket prices. Morgan Harper, director of policy & advocacy at theAmerican Economic Liberties Project, joined TheStreet to discuss the goals of the ‘Break Up Ticketmaster’ coalition.
Transcript:
MORGAN HARPER: The goals of the breakup Ticketmaster coalition are pretty simple: to break up Ticketmaster. We had a few different constituencies come together here artists, fans, consumer advocates that were all recognizing the harm stemming from this monopoly in the live events industry and wanted to provide a platform for people to reach out to the department of justice and say this company needs to be stopped. It needs to be split up, break up Ticketmaster. And as a result of that, we sent over one actually people in just throughout the country sent over 100,000 letters to the Department of Justice demanding that department of justice open an investigation and break up this monopoly. And so now seeing that the department of justice antitrust division has actually filed a complaint, has started the process of a lawsuit that could result in the eventual breakup of LiveNation Ticketmaster.
Our antitrust laws in the United States have been on the books for over 100 years. The Sherman Act, for example. And these laws were created to prevent or to to stop monopolizing conduct when businesses were suppressing competition in any particular market. And so that’s why we’ve seen in the department of justice antitrust case relying on these laws that have been around for quite some time, they should be sufficient to stop this kind of conduct. Now, we’ll have to see what a court of law decides in response to this lawsuit and eventually how a jury would decide this. The DOJ is asking for a jury trial here, but it does appear that this is the definition of monopolizing conduct and it is inflicting a lot of harm across the economy, both to consumers, to fans, and to, importantly, other businesses, which doesn’t always get highlighted as much.
But there’s a lot of businesses in the live events industry that are not able to compete as a result of this market power. It’s not just a consumer issue. Folks that want to own venues and be more independent in doing so. People who run concession companies at venues that are trying to make money off of sales, that would happen during a concert there. All of these different types of of companies and businesses of all sizes are trying desperately to compete in this market that LiveNation Ticketmaster is dominating. And that could be addressed through this antitrust lawsuit.
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