Photo Credit: Michael Rapino & Jelly Roll (Instagram)
Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino was called to testify in the civil antitrust trial against the company filed by two dozen state attorneys general.
Michael Rapino, Live Nation’s CEO since 2005, was called to testify on Thursday in the civil antitrust trial from over two dozen states that allege Live Nation-Ticketmaster is a monopoly. The chief executive said it was “disgusting” that one of his top ticketing employees talked about “robbing [fans] blind” in internal messages.
Attorney Jeffrey Kessler, representing the states, pushed Rapino about the aforementioned Slack messages sent between two employees—Ben Baker and Jeff Weinhold—around 2022 and 2023, Rapino said, “It’s disgusting and it’s not the way we operate.” He noted elsewhere during his testimony that he was “very proud” of the company as a whole.
Live Nation has tried to downplay the employees’ connection to the company, stressing in a statement to Digital Music News that Baker and Weinhold were not executives. Baker, who testified in the trial earlier this week, confirmed suspicions that he had not been reprimanded for the messages and that he had been promoted multiple times since.
The company also asserts that it only became aware of the messages when the public did, and was still looking into the matter. Rapino confirmed during his own testimony that Baker had not yet been disciplined, but that he would “deal with it this week.”
Kessler also grilled Rapino on the increase in fees attached to tickets in the last few years. He also focused on artists’ complaints about these fees in relation to their fans, and seemingly convoluted ticketing rules. Artists including Adele, The Cure, and Paul McCartney have all complained about ticketing in the past, something Rapino acknowledged.
Specifically, Kessler confronted Rapino about a message he sent in 2016 to a representative involved in an Alabama Shakes concert that read, “Our fees are too high; we can’t defend them.” Rapino said he didn’t remember that exchange or what it referred to.
Kessler pointed to one of Rapino’s own comments from a 2019 deposition in which the CEO said the company had “built an incredible moat around the castle of Live Nation.” Rapino denied Kessler’s claims that this referred to the company’s long-term exclusive contracts that left competitors out in the cold in the ticketing and promoting industry. Instead, he insisted that Live Nation was just trying to “build a better mousetrap,” but that its business model was no different from its competitors.
But Rapino agreed that if an artist wanted to perform at a venue owned by Live Nation, they have no choice but to use Live Nation’s promotion services. Further, he acknowledged that fees for tickets, parking, concessions, and lawn chairs at the company’s amphitheaters were paid for by fans in the form of (optional) ancillary charges. When asked if he thought those fees were “outrageous,” as Baker called them in his messages, Rapino said no.
