Justice OKs Ticketmaster-Live Nation Merger— With Conditions

“After a year-long review closely watched for signs of the direction the Obama administration’s antitrust regulators will take, the Justice Department today signed off on the merger between ticket giant Ticketmaster and concert promoter Live Nation. But DOJ insisted on a number of changes in the deal.”

“In order to win regulatory approval, the combined firm agreed to a list of DOJ’s changes to the deal: Ticketmaster will license its ticketing software and divest some ticketing assets, and refrain from bundling tickets with other services in an anticompetitive way, retaliating against venues that choose other ticketing services, or using consumer data in to gain an unfair advantage in its promotion business, according to documents filed today in federal court in Washington, D.C.”

“But the long list of remedies doesn’t necessarily represent a major change in antitrust enforcement under the Obama administration, since many observers had expected the Justice Department to block the merger outright.”

“The companies were interested in the merger for the vertical integration it would provide, and critics of the deal had also focused on the so-called vertical concerns the merger raised, or the kinds of access the deal might close off for rival promoters or ticketing outlets.”

“The remedies in the proposed settlement focus on the horizontal issues of the deal and how to create competing ticketing firms. Neither Comcast nor AEG is currently a major player in the ticketing market, and no substantial competitor to Ticketmaster has emerged in several years.

“‘It is less than perfect, and you have got to be a little bit uncomfortable’ with companies that don’t already have a presence in the market, said Marc Schildkraut, a partner at the Washington, D.C., Howrey law firm, who worked at the Federal Trade Commission’s competition bureau. ‘But they are pretty substantial companies, and DOJ probably tried pretty hard to vet these people [to ensure] that they were going to be serious competitors.”’

“The deal’s critics said they remained concerned about the proposed remedies.”