There’s an amazing (and hilarious) video that’s been doing the rounds for the past few years of a 1993 interview with Nirvana about concert ticket prices. As the above photo of frontman Kurt Cobain illustrates, the band was horrified to learn that some artists were charging upwards of $50 to attend one of their shows. Nirvana, meanwhile, was charging around $25.
Were he still alive, Cobain might be even more horrified of what ticket prices are like today. Natural inflation aside, the crosshairs for why that’s so are squarely falling on one entity – a company that has taken over and become dominant in nearly every aspect of the concert-going experience: Live Nation Entertainment.
Legal and regulatory actions against the company are multiplying rapidly. U.S. antitrust enforcers with the Department of Justice are trying to break the company up while the Federal Trade Commission is suing the company for artificially inflating prices. A host of class-action suits over Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary are proliferating in both the U.S. and Canada. Even the Swifties, still mad over Ticketmaster’s mishandling of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, are continuing their lawsuit.
Add a major new Canadian case to this list. Mirroring the DOJ, the Consumers Council of Canada is asking the Competition Tribunal to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
Filed over the holidays, it’s among the first cases to take advantage of new competition laws in Canada that allow private parties to bring abuse-of-dominance charges in the name of the public interest. We’ve covered the other two – an indie game developer taking on Google’s search deal with Apple, and the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic case against Apple’s App Store – here on Do Not Pass Go. It’s clear that this is a growing wave.
Neil Hartung, a lawyer and director with the Consumers Council, joins the podcast this week to explain why the advocacy group is taking a stand and why it thinks it can actually break up a giant American company. (Read the filing here)
It’s worth noting that literally no one else is covering this movement, which is why it’s amazing that you’re here. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this important work.
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