Live Nation poses extra of a risk to impartial promoters and venues than scalpers, officers with the Nationwide Unbiased Venue Affiliation (NIVA) informed the Trump administration in an open letter to the Federal Commerce Fee (FTC) and the Division of Justice (DOJ) on Monday (July 7).
The letter follows a name for public remark from the 2 companies within the wake of an government order by President Trump earlier this 12 months geared toward addressing long-standing shopper complaints in regards to the occasion ticketing enterprise. Whereas each Dwell Nation and NIVA submitted prolonged responses urging Congress to go a slate of reform packages focusing on usually criticized practices within the ticket resale enterprise, NIVA officers additionally included a number of criticisms of Dwell Nation in its letter, calling for the corporate to be damaged up and compelled to pay a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} yearly in authorized settlements.
In his letter to the FTC and DOJ, NIVA government director Stephen Parker accused Dwell Nation of utilizing its vertically built-in “flywheel” mannequin to outbid impartial live performance promoters for artist excursions, understanding that the cash the corporate loses on the live performance enterprise can be made up from income from ticketing charges, venue possession, artist administration charges, merchandise gross sales and promoting and sponsorship packages it sells to main manufacturers. Parker referred to as Dwell Nation’s market energy a “direct results of a coverage failure in 2010, when the U.S. Division of Justice (DOJ) allowed the merger of Dwell Nation and Ticketmaster,” including that the DOJ’s lawsuit towards Dwell Nation filed in Could 2024 represented a chance to “right this error and ship structural change that ought to have been required fifteen years in the past.”
Notably, NIVA’s laborious line towards Dwell Nation comes because the live performance promotion large fights for its survival in U.S. District courtroom after the Department of Justice and 40 states attorneys general introduced go well with towards the corporate final 12 months on costs that the corporate acted monopolistically and used its scale to unfairly compete within the live performance promotion market.
Later within the letter, Parker pointed to Dwell Nation’s artist administration enterprise, which he claims offers “its promotions division the proper of first refusal” to immediately submit gives to the most important artists within the business. He additionally accused the corporate of unfairly implementing its radius clauses, punishing artists who decide to work with impartial promoters and “demanding to be added as a ‘co-promoter’ on exhibits it had no involvement in reserving.”
“The Nationwide Unbiased Venue Affiliation 2025 State of Dwell report paints a stark image of what impartial venues face,” Parker’s letter continued, referring to NIVA’s first-ever complete nationwide financial influence research released last month. “Regardless of internet hosting greater than 153,000 occasions, serving 183.7 million followers, and driving $10.6 billion in off-site tourism spending and $19.3 billion in tax income, 64% of impartial venues have been unprofitable in 2024, and almost one-quarter struggled simply to remain open.”
Together with calling for the pressured divestiture of Dwell Nation into 4 separate corporations, Parker needs Dwell Nation to pay right into a “long-term fund of $300–$500 million yearly for no less than 15 years, financed via settlement contributions, disgorgement, or performance-based income shares,” including that the fund “would help capital funding, advertising help, and operational sustainability for small and mid-sized impartial venues, festivals, and promoters.”
In their very own letter to the FTC and DOJ, Dwell Nation officers refuted NIVA’s claims in regards to the firm’s influence on impartial promoters and outlined their very own suggestions for cleansing up the reside occasions business — particularly, by cracking down on the secondary ticketing enterprise.
Dwell Nation’s suggestions embrace giving artists “the unique rights to determine if, when and the way their tickets may be resold” and capping the sum of money a scalper can cost followers to not more than 20% above face worth (in Parker’s letter, he says NIVA needs resale capped at 10%).
Within the letter, Dwell Nation officers additional acknowledged that the rising resale market wasn’t solely being pushed by automated bots, noting that “one underappreciated technique is the usage of automation to create 1000’s of ‘artificial’ accounts, which means major ticketing accounts that look like regular fan accounts however are literally managed by ticket brokers.”
Greater than 80,000 new accounts are created every single day at Ticketmaster, in response to Dwell Nation’s letter, which continues that “there may be robust proof that a good portion of latest accounts are unhealthy actors producing pretend accounts.”
Dwell Nation has skilled latest cyber assaults, the letter explains, together with greater than 25 million every day makes an attempt to create pretend accounts, typically by personal IP addresses making greater than 10,000 makes an attempt at a time.
“Scalpers depend on a low success price to finish up with banks of faux accounts,” the letter continues, including that the burden “falls on Ticketmaster to establish and weed out the pretend accounts. We’re more and more ready to take action, however nobody needs to be glad a couple of system that allows rogue actors to bombard major tickets methods with pretend accounts, bots, and all the remaining, after which depends on the ticketing corporations to wash up the mess.”