‘Selective non-prosecution of political allies’ — a week after the DOJ deal, a 27-state jury finds an illegal monopoly
The Justice Department’s decision to abandon its monopoly case against Live Nation and Ticketmaster through a settlement just one week into trial drew pointed public criticism from the prosecutors who built and led it.
Jung Han
The suit — filed under the Biden administration alongside more than 30 states and years in the making — targeted a market whose concentration traces back to the companies’ 2010 merger and a consent decree that, by the prosecutors’ account, failed to function over the following 16 years.
Speaking at the National Independent Venues Alliance (NIVA) annual conference, which opened Monday in Minneapolis, former DOJ Deputy Director of Litigation David Dahlquist said he believed the government would win when he delivered the opening statement, and still held that conviction when the settlement was entered. He knew the case, the witnesses and the evidence, he told the audience.
Dahlquist confirmed that he and his trial team were shut out of the negotiations that produced the deal. He said he first saw the settlement terms only on the morning it was announced in court, and was never asked for input.
A trial team excluded from its own resolution points to a decision made at the highest levels of the administration; the Wall Street Journal has reported that President Trump intervened personally. Dahlquist said his team stayed on afterward to hand the case off to the states pressing forward.
U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian, who presided over the trial, was likewise blindsided by the settlement. He said the parties’ conduct strained the bounds of responsible behavior and was inconsistent with the principles the court upholds.
With the federal government out, 27 states continued the suit, and in April a jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster hold an illegal monopoly over the U.S. ticketing market. Subramanian has yet to determine what remedies he will impose on the companies for operating it.
Alford, a Republican former prosecutor who also spoke, wrote in a prepared statement last month that the Antitrust Division is engaged in “selective non-prosecution of political allies” in cases such as Live Nation/Ticketmaster — a practice he said has grown common and one that invites anticompetitive mergers, collusion and monopoly abuse. Alford said he was fired in July 2025 for resisting inappropriate lobbying. He, then-antitrust chief Gail Slater and other deputies sought to resolve the cases on their merits and pushed back against the lobbying around the Live Nation/Ticketmaster matter, he said, and were removed for doing so. He argued the department would not have dropped the case absent those efforts.
Alford called the 2010 merger a flawed proposition from the outset, saying 16 years of promised compliance under the consent decree had done nothing to fix the live-music and ticketing market — an unusual record of broken assurances that, in his view, will weigh on the judge’s ruling.
Closing the morning session, NIVA executive director Stephen Parker called the two men “heroes.”
Background — Why This Case Matters
Ticketmaster, founded in 1976, controls roughly 80% of primary ticketing at major U.S. concert venues. Live Nation is the world’s largest concert promoter and venue operator. Their 2010 merger created Live Nation Entertainment, vertically integrating promotion, venues and ticketing under one roof — the structure at the heart of the case. The DOJ approved the merger under a consent decree barring retaliation against venues that chose rival ticketing services; that order was later extended and tightened in 2019 after violations, yet did little to loosen the company’s grip.
The current fight was set off by the November 2022 meltdown of Ticketmaster’s site during Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” presale — overwhelmed by billions of requests — which pushed congressional scrutiny into a formal antitrust suit in May 2024 seeking a structural breakup.
For Korean readers, the stakes are concrete: many K-pop tours and arena dates in the U.S. route through the Live Nation–Ticketmaster pipeline, so fees, seat allocation and resale rules bear directly on Korean artists and fans. Whether rivals such as AXS (AEG) or SeatGeek gain room to compete now hinges on the case’s outcome, shaping the cost structure of the U.S. live market and K-content’s distribution environment there.
출처 / Sources: Variety, AP, PBS NewsHour, NBC News, Nashville Banner, Britannica, R Street Institute, U.S. DOJ 소장(2024), Wikipedia. 소송 참여 주 수는 보도별로 차이(30여 개—40개+D.C.).