In the fourth week of Live Nation’s antitrust trial, key defense witnesses took the stand as the concert giant continued to make its case to the jury — and the company also accused its biggest competitor of using underhanded tactics to prevent a key witness from testifying.
You’re reading Billboard’s weekly Live Nation trial recap, a weekly one-sheet of everything that happened in the monopoly case against the concert giant. Stay tuned here each Friday for all the testimony and big events you might have missed.
WHAT HAPPENED: After the state attorneys general wrapped up their case last week, Live Nation continued presenting its own case to the jury this week — trying to persuade them to reject the narrative that the company is an illegal monopolist that bullies music venues into using Ticketmaster.
The blockbuster trial has been chugging along in Manhattan federal court since early March. It was initially led by the U.S. Department of Justice, but the feds reached a settlement with Live Nation a week into the trial. New York, California and dozens more states said that deal wasn’t strong enough and have moved ahead with the trial, with the goal of breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
This week was a relatively short one in the trial, with no jury testimony on Wednesday (April 1) or Thursday (April 2) as the judge and the parties dealt with legal issues. The trial will continue Monday (April 6), with the potential for closing statements and the start of jury deliberations at some point in the next week.
WHO TESTIFIED: Weeks after the ex-boss of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center testified that he believed Live Nation had threatened to withhold major artists if the venue switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek, the arena’s current top exec took the stand and pushed back on that story.
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Laurie Jacoby, CEO of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, testified Tuesday about problems during SeatGeek’s tenure as the venue’s ticketer, including with on-sales for concerts by The Strokes and My Chemical Romance, according to Inner City Press. She told jurors those issues made it hard to attract and retain acts, which was what ultimately prompted the venue to switch back to Ticketmaster.
Other Live Nation witnesses similarly countered earlier testimony. In the first week of the trial, an exec at the NHL’s Minnesota Wild told jurors that he’d stuck with Ticketmaster because he feared the “catastrophic” problem of losing Live Nation concerts. But on Monday, as reported by MLex, an official at the NHL’s Washington Capitals testified that Ticketmaster is a “great business partner.”
“Their professionalism and the way they treat partners is outstanding,” said Jim Van Stone, president of business operations at Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which also owns the NBA’s Washington Wizards and D.C.’s Capital One Arena. “Ticketmaster … that has met all our needs. We believe in the fact that an exclusive relationship [with Ticketmaster] is better for us.”
Also testifying this week was expert witness Eric Budish, a University of Chicago professor, who said Ticketmaster has a genuine competitive edge against rival ticketing services, per MLex. But during cross-examination, he also admitted to having been paid more than $1 million by Live Nation for his services as an expert economic witness in the case.
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Perhaps the biggest fireworks of the week came not in the form of live testimony to the jury, but in legal filings to the judge. In a scathing motion filed Thursday, Live Nation demanded sanctions (judicial punishment) against the states over accusations that AEG had secretly supplied them with a “dossier of personal information” about a former employee, which they then exploited to prevent him from testifying.
“This blatant attempt to dissuade a witness from providing truthful testimony through intimidation is intolerable,” Live Nation’s lawyers wrote, asking the judge to inform jurors that AEG and the states have been “closely coordinating” and that they had tried to suppress testimony that AXS was “never of comparable quality to Ticketmaster.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Jacoby, Van Stone and Budish’s testimony goes to the very heart of Live Nation’s defense: That it has secured its massive market share over the past 15 years not through anti-competitive behavior, but by simply being better than its rivals.
Threats to Barclays Center if it went with SeatGeek? No, Jacoby said — Ticketmaster was just the better ticketing option for the arena. Improper use of exclusivity contracts to make it harder for venues to switch? No, Van Stone said — exclusivity is just what some venues themselves prefer.
The sanctions motion serves that same argument. Live Nation alleges that the reason AEG and the states went to such lengths to suppress the ex-employee’s testimony is because it would have shown that AEG’s AXS ticketing system was simply not as good as Ticketmaster — something Live Nation says would “fundamentally undermine plaintiffs’ case.” If granted, it would send a powerful message to jurors that the government was worried that argument might succeed.
