Photo Credit: Benjamin Sharpe
Following the confirmation of a February 2026 conversation between Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino and the president, the Coalition for Ticket Fairness (CTF) is calling for the DOJ settlement to be scrapped.
The CTF doubled down on its opposition in a brief release today, and said release arrived after legal documents confirmed that Rapino had met with President Trump prior to the Justice Department-Live Nation settlement.
(According to Live Nation itself: “In February 2026, Mr. Rapino discussed a variety of topics related to Live Nation’s business with President Donald J. Trump; the status of DOJ’s lawsuit against Defendants came up but no substantive terms regarding any potential settlement were discussed.”)
As many know, this early trial settlement elicited a good bit of criticism – including from Justice Department brass, Kid Rock, and the litigating states. Admittedly, some of the pushback ramped up after the fact.
In March, the Coalition for Ticket Fairness applauded the settlement as “an important step toward accountability” and commended “the leadership of the U.S. Department of Justice for taking action,” for instance.
(On the opposite side of the equation, meeting with the White House certainly made sense for Rapino, who was at one point reportedly staring down the possibility of a criminal indictment. Though it’s the market leader in concert promotion, Live Nation, the frequent target of bipartisan lawmaker criticism, has yet to master the art of lobbying.)
Those states opted to keep the trial going and went on to secure a victory; jurors determined that Live Nation had overcharged consumers by about $1.72 per primary concert ticket at “major venues” due to “Ticketmaster’s alleged anticompetitive conduct.”
While penalties may not come down until 2027, the litigating states haven’t hesitated to urge the presiding judge to toss the DOJ settlement and to split Ticketmaster from Live Nation.
And the way the like-minded Coalition for Ticket Fairness sees things, the court should “reject” the DOJ settlement in part because of the just-confirmed conversation.
“When the Justice Department settled mid-trial without telling its own trial team or the judge, it smelled like foul play,” CTF spokesman Geoff Vetter said. “Now the court filings confirm that the CEO of Live Nation spoke with the president just before that deal was struck.
“Fans don’t need a backroom deal that preserves monopoly control over live events,” he concluded. “They need real competition, choice and transparency. That means giving fans more options, allowing independent ticketing platforms and small businesses to compete and creating room for innovation in a market that the Ticketmaster monopoly has been allowed to dominate for far too long.”
Time will tell whether these and similar arguments make way for the court-ordered divestment of Ticketmaster. Though the fact has perhaps receded into the background, the Live Nation-Justice Department settlement does contain significant concessions.
This includes but isn’t limited to the end of Oak View Group ticketing deals, the implementation of ticket-fee caps, steps to open up Ticketmaster, and hefty fines for consent-decree violations.
Moreover, it wasn’t too long ago that the Justice Department gave the initial Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger the green light; blocking the deal at the outset probably would have been wise.
And especially given the above-summarized concessions, it’s unclear whether essentially reversing course now (via the states’ case, that is) would be advisable from the precedent perspective.
Additionally, what would a Live Nation-Ticketmaster split, and the ticketing-landscape effects thereof, look like in practice?
One could spill plenty of ink attempting to answer the question if so inclined. But at the top level, it’s worth reiterating that ticketing shenanigans aren’t confined to a single platform; below-board practices are far from rare on resale sites.
To be sure, speculative passes, fake tickets, and “deceptive ticketing URLs,” fueled in large part by massive alleged resale operations, are all factoring into a wider issue that will prove decidedly difficult to fix.
