Numlock Sunday: Pat Garofalo on how Live Nation and Ticketmaster won — for now

Photo by Philip Yu on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Pat Garofalo who wrote What the Ticketmaster Settlement Failed to Achieve for Boondoggle. Here’s what I wrote about it:

The Department of Justice abruptly cut a deal with Live Nation, agreeing to drop the antitrust suit against the titan of the live event industry and owner of Ticketmaster, leaving the state attorneys general to carry the case forward themselves. In exchange, Live Nation-Ticketmaster — which still controls 70 percent of the primary ticketing market in the United States — will pay $280 million in restitution. Given that the penalty is equivalent to about four days’ worth of corporate revenue and the deal was cut on Monday, Live Nation will be past all this unpleasantness sometime tomorrow night.

There are few issues as unifying as “the concert experience has gotten too expensive and the monopolies that control it have made the process of getting to attend them unnecess…