Numlock Sunday: Pat Garofalo on the battle over the future of state subsidized stadiums

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Pat Garofalo, who writes

Boondoggle

and is the author of the book The Billionaire Boondoggle. He’s had a busy spring; here’s a recent story from him in Numlock:

A new bill introduced in California would ban exclusive contracting in the ticketing industry, a direct attack on Ticketmaster. Those clauses are in the contracts between the venues and the sellers, and force venues to exclusively use that seller for their ticketing needs. This has been used to great effect by Ticketmaster owner Live Nation, as it’s the ticket seller for 70 percent of the venues in the country and thus is pretty much the only game in town in many places. That hegemony is helped in no small part because of the threat that Live Nation Entertainment, which operates tours, might retaliate and avoid venues that don’t use Ticketmaster when scheduling events. Indeed, there’s a lawsuit alleging precisely that. Those exclusivity clauses might last five to …