As Live Nation opens its defense in the antitrust trial brought by more than 30 states and the District of Columbia, its message to jurors is coming into focus: Ticketmaster isn’t dominant because Live Nation used its control of promotion, venues, and ticketing to box out rivals, but because competitors’ products are inferior.
That theme has surfaced across multiple defense witnesses. Omar al‑Joulani, Live Nation’s touring president, told jurors the company does not decide where artists play based on which ticketing platform a venue uses. And Rick Mueller, the former president of AEG Presents North America, testified that promoters had real frustrations with AEG’s AXS platform and that Ticketmaster remained the stronger tool.
But if Live Nation wants to frame this as simple product superiority, the broader record is more complicated. Newly surfaced trial documents and outside reporting suggest Ticketmaster’s own executives were confronting persistent fan complaints, internal dissatisfaction, technology breakdowns, and strategic concerns about the company’s delivery—even as Live Nation now asks jurors to treat rival weakness as the main explanation for its market power.
Prior trial coverage: (TicketNews): Live Nation Trial: States Say Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan More Sales Pitch Than Solution; OVG Admits Paid ‘Advocate’ Role | More Below
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The defense appears organized around a straightforward proposition: artists choose venues, promoters want reliable tools, and Ticketmaster wins business because it performs better than alternatives.
That point came through most clearly in testimony from al-Joulani, who said Live Nation will book artists into venues regardless of the ticketer and that the company does not force artists into buildings they don’t want to play. According to courtroom reporting, he testified that “we don’t make decisions based on who the ticketer is,” and said Ticketmaster offers a better set of promoter‑facing and fan‑facing tools than its competitors.
Mueller’s testimony, as recounted by MLex, reinforced the same narrative from another angle. He described repeated frustrations with AXS while at AEG, including operational problems serious enough to pull management time away from concert promotion. Even after AEG invested in the platform during the pandemic slowdown, Mueller testified that Ticketmaster still had the better overall ticketing tool.
That framing helps the defense because it offers jurors a cleaner, more intuitive explanation for dominance than the states’ more layered monopoly theory. If competitors are simply worse, Ticketmaster’s market share can look less like exclusion and more like market preference.
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Some newly public exhibits support that framing. One admitted exhibit (1327‑1) shows Bowery Presents complaining in blunt terms about AXS performance, citing “numerous service interruptions, outages, and data feed failures,” and saying those issues had created a “lack of confidence in the product provided by AXS.” Another internal communication (1340‑1) described AXS as “#3 in a 2 horse race,” neatly capturing the defense’s broader effort to portray AXS as a persistently underwhelming rival in a market where Ticketmaster and SeatGeek were seen as stronger players.
Other documents tell a similar story. A PromoWest exchange (1340‑3) raised concerns about maintenance messages appearing during sales, app‑download friction, confusing anti‑bot prompts, and fees higher than promoters thought customers should have to tolerate. Taken together, those records help explain why Live Nation thinks it can persuade jurors that promoters and ticket buyers often preferred Ticketmaster for reasons unrelated to anticompetitive coercion.
That part of the defense case shouldn’t be dismissed. If the states want to convince jurors that Live Nation’s dominance was built through leverage and foreclosure, they still have to grapple with the reality that some rivals had meaningful product problems.
The problem for Live Nation is that its product‑superiority narrative doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The company is making that argument against a growing body of evidence suggesting Ticketmaster itself was grappling with fundamental weaknesses, fan backlash, and internal concern over whether the platform was delivering what the market needed.
That includes material already surfaced in recent reporting and exhibits. As Digital Music News noted, former Ticketmaster technology chief Carlos Alvarez wrote after a problematic on sale that Ticketmaster had “fundamental issues specifically with tribal knowledge and troubleshooting principles.” The outlet also highlighted an internal survey in which 90 percent of interviewees were described as not satisfied with delivery against the strategic plan.
The documents in evidence go further. A 2024 Ticketmaster strategy deck (1335‑1) identified a familiar set of “fan pain points,” including distrust, friction, confusing experiences, and the sense that the system was not working in the interest of ordinary buyers. It also laid out business goals that sit uncomfortably beside the company’s public‑facing rhetoric about helping fans, including expanding resale participation and demand‑based pricing capabilities.
That matters because it complicates the clean defense story now being presented to jurors. Live Nation wants this framed as a case where a better tool beat weaker rivals. But the internal materials suggest Ticketmaster’s own leaders were wrestling with a more uncomfortable reality: that many fans were unhappy, many internal stakeholders saw the platform as strategically underperforming, and the company’s commercial priorities did not always align with its consumer‑protection messaging.
In that light, the central issue isn’t simply whether AXS or SeatGeek had flaws. It’s whether Live Nation’s scale and leverage allowed Ticketmaster to remain dominant even while carrying well‑known problems of its own.
That distinction matters because the states’ theory has never depended on proving that every Ticketmaster rival had a better product. Their case is that Live Nation’s vertical integration gave it power across multiple layers of the live‑events business—power that could shape competition even if Ticketmaster’s rivals were imperfect.
Outside antitrust observers have made that point. In discussing the settlement that pulled DOJ out of the trial Harvard antitrust scholar Rebecca Haw Allensworth said the problem with Live Nation isn’t confined to one service line but to the way it operates across promotion, venue control, and ticketing at the same time. In her telling, that vertical structure creates bottlenecks for competitors and makes piecemeal remedies inadequate.
The major problem with vertical integration is what it does for potential competitive entry. It’s how Live Nation has managed to stay as dominant and grow its dominance over the last 15 years.
-Rebecca Haw Allensworth
The ongoing state‑led trial is testing exactly that question. Can Live Nation convince jurors that Ticketmaster won because it built the better mousetrap? Or will jurors see a company whose dominance was reinforced by its ability to control venues, promotions, artist relationships, and exclusive ticketing arrangements in ways rivals couldn’t realistically match?
That question remains unresolved. But as the defense gets underway, it’s becoming clearer that Live Nation wants to narrow the frame as much as possible—away from interlocking market power and toward a simpler contest over product quality.
At the same time, another issue continues to shadow the trial: how much of the evidentiary record remains hidden from public view.
By now, the docket reflects an extraordinary volume of sealing requests from Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and a wide range of non‑parties tied to the ticketing and venue ecosystem. The result is that large portions of the expert record, contract evidence, pricing evidence, and related exhibits remain sealed or heavily redacted even as the trial continues in open court.
That isn’t just a side fight. In one recent filing (1319), Inner City Press argued that the pricing documents at issue “are the case,” specifically objecting to efforts to keep core materials—including event‑level data and a massive compilation of Ticketmaster contracts—from public access.
That challenge lands with force because the more Live Nation argues that its dominance reflects superior performance, the more important it becomes for the public to see documents showing how its contracts, pricing structures, and competitive relationships actually worked in practice.
The defense has every incentive to foreground promotional videos, user‑friendly innovation stories, and witnesses who disliked AXS. But the public interest lies just as much—if not more—in the contracts, internal pricing discussions, expert datasets, and technology records that remain harder to access.
None of this is unfolding in a vacuum. Even as Live Nation’s lawyers try to reposition the case around product quality and artist choice, criticism of the company—and of DOJ’s abandoned federal case—continues to build outside the courtroom.
The National Consumers League and Sen. Cory Booker last week urged the remaining states to keep pressing forward, with Booker calling the DOJ settlement “a slap in the face to American concertgoers” and saying families deserve more than a deal that leaves the company largely intact. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is among the states still pursuing the case, has gone even further, describing the federal settlement as a “sweetheart deal” and tying it to broader concerns about political influence and unequal enforcement.
“The Justice Department’s decision to strike a deal with Live Nation-Ticketmaster, rather than take the case to trial, is a slap in the face to American concertgoers who are increasingly being priced out of seeing their favorite artists. The Trump Administration had the opportunity to confront this monopoly but choose the side of corporate powers instead.”
-Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ)
That broader backdrop underscores how high the stakes remain even after DOJ’s exit. The trial is no longer just a technical fight over market definition, contract structure, or comparative ticketing tools. It has become a test of whether the remaining states can persuade a jury that Live Nation’s dominance was not merely earned in competition, but reinforced through a structure that made meaningful competition harder and more fragile at every level of the business.
And that makes the defense’s current strategy understandable. If Live Nation can reduce the case to a story about weak rivals and better software, it has a much easier path. If jurors instead keep seeing the wider system—including internal doubts, venue leverage, exclusivity fights, and the still‑hidden contracts at the center of the case—the states may still have a powerful argument to press.
Further USA vs. Live Nation Entertainment Trial Coverage from TicketNews– 3/26: States Say Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan more Sales Pitch than Solution; OVG Testifies to Undisclosed “Advocate” Payments
– 3/26: DOJ Defends its Settlement of Live Nation Case as “Blueprint”
-3/24: Judge Demands DOJ/LN Settlement Details be Made Public, Promptly
⁃ 3/23: Trump Personally Pressed for Settlement, Met With Rapino March 5
⁃ 3/20: After Rapino Fireworks, States Re-center Live Nation Trial on its Use of Leverage
⁃ 3/19: States Put Live Nation’s Rapino at Center of Ticketmaster Strategy
⁃ 3/18 Tech, Venue Leverage, and What Jurors May Not Hear Ahead of Rapino Testimony
⁃ 3/17: Live Nation Trial Presses Fees, Conditioning, and Consent-Decree Questions
⁃ 3/16: Trial Resumes; States Press Amphitheater Case, Judge Presses Tunney Compliance
⁃ Earlier: Most States to Press On with Antitrust Trial, Resuming Monday in New York
⁃ Internal Chats Illustrate Holdback, Platinum Pricing Squeeze
⁃ Unsealed Exhibits Show Ticketing Executives Mocking Fans, Boasting of Upsell Charges
⁃ Judge presses states to negotiate after DOJ’s shock settlement— holdout AGs push for mistrial
⁃ Judge Says DOJ, Live Nation Showed “Absolute Disrespect” for Court in Settlement Chaos
⁃ DOJ-Live Nation Term Sheet Details Settlement Framework
⁃ Live Nation, DOJ Reach Settlement Avoiding Ticketmaster Breakup
⁃ Consumers, Policy Groups, and Lawmakers Slam Proposed Settlement
⁃ States Plan to Continue Pursuing Live Nation Antitrust Case Without DOJ
⁃ Live Nation Says DOJ Settlement Will “Improve the Concert Experience,” Denies Antitrust Allegations
⁃ ’I Will Not Be Gaslit’: Consumers React to DOJ-Live Nation Settlement
