Judge Rebukes Live Nation Over Tone as Company Tries to Fast‑Track Post‑Verdict Attack

Live Nation’s first serious attempt to claw back part of last week’s monopoly verdict earned it something more immediate than relief: a public scolding from the judge.

In a memo‑endorsed order Monday, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian denied the company’s bid to expedite a ruling on its pending motion to strike the testimony of plaintiffs’ damages expert, Dr. Rosa Abrantes‑Metz — and used the moment to issue an unusually blunt warning about the filing’s tone. “The motion to expedite is DENIED,” he wrote, adding that counsel had “already been cautioned for the tone of their filings” and that the rhetoric in this latest letter was “inconsistent with the Court’s rule requiring civility,” “counterproductive,” and likely to “distract from the merits of a party’s argument.”

That is not the language of a judge entertaining a claim of urgency. It is the language of a judge unimpressed by a litigant trying to turn post‑verdict frustration into an emergency application. Subramanian made clear the court will resolve the underlying dispute “in due course,” not on Live Nation’s preferred timetable.

The dispute centers on Abrantes‑Metz, the economist whose analysis supplied the jury’s damages figure after jurors found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the core markets presented at trial.

In its April 17 letter motion, Live Nation argued that the jury’s award showed it had adopted her work wholesale, noting that jurors wrote in — “to the cent” — the high end of her overcharge range for every damages state. On that basis, the company demanded that the court immediately grant its earlier motion to strike her testimony and wipe out the damages portion of the verdict without further briefing.

It was a bold request, given that Subramanian had already reserved decision on both the Rule 50(a) motion and the motion to strike Abrantes‑Metz’s testimony in an April 8 order. The court had already said these issues would wait. Live Nation’s response was to return after the verdict and ask, essentially, that the normal process now be skipped because the company disliked what the jury did with the evidence.

The states said as much, albeit in more lawyerly terms. In their April 20 opposition, plaintiffs argued that the motion to expedite ignored the court’s prior directions and attempted to bypass the orderly post‑trial process Subramanian had laid out. They noted that the court had expressly said disputes over Abrantes‑Metz’s testimony would be addressed in the context of post‑trial Rule 50 motions, with both sides given a full opportunity for additional briefing.

Plaintiffs also said Live Nation filed its demand for immediate relief without even conducting the meet‑and‑confer process the court had instructed the parties to undertake after the verdict.

That procedural backdrop makes the judge’s rebuke more revealing. This was not simply a court saying no to an aggressive request. It was a court signaling that the request itself — and the manner in which it was made — had crossed into counterproductive territory. For a company that responded to the verdict with public defiance and vows to keep fighting, it is an early reminder that post‑trial bluster is not the same as post‑trial leverage.

And the verdict Live Nation is now trying to chip away at was no narrow loss. The April 15 verdict form shows jurors found for plaintiffs across every major federal question submitted to them. They found that plaintiffs had proven both the market for primary ticketing services to “major concert venues” and the market for primary concert ticketing services to those venues; that Ticketmaster willfully acquired or maintained monopoly power in both through exclusionary conduct; that Ticketmaster’s conduct caused anticompetitive effects in both markets; and that Live Nation controlled, dictated, or encouraged Ticketmaster’s conduct there. Jurors also found that plaintiffs had proven the market for the use of “large amphitheaters” by artists, that Live Nation willfully acquired or maintained monopoly power in that market through exclusionary conduct, and that Live Nation unlawfully tied artist‑promotion services to artists’ use of those amphitheaters.

The verdict did not stop at liability. It also included state‑by‑state findings that Live Nation, Ticketmaster, or both engaged in unlawful conduct that harmed competition in each plaintiff state listed on the form. Then, for the states that reached the damages question, jurors entered the same number over and over again: $1.72 per ticket.

That figure is why Abrantes‑Metz now sits at the center of Live Nation’s post‑verdict strategy. Her public trial demonstrative shows the states’ damages theory in stripped‑down form. She told jurors that Ticketmaster charged $2.30 more per ticket than AXS in retained fees, and that between 68% and 75% of that excess was passed through to fans — producing a fan overcharge of $1.56 to $1.72 per ticket. Her slides also emphasized that Ticketmaster and AXS were comparable enough to benchmark against one another and argued that upfront payments to venues were “not part of the ticket price,” a position the defense attacked relentlessly.

Dr. Abrantes-Metz demonstratives from the Prosecution (Case file 1424-9)

The states’ broader trial architecture, which the jury accepted, was laid out in economist Nicholas Hill’s demonstratives. Those slides presented Ticketmaster as holding an 86% share of primary concert ticketing at major concert venues and Live Nation as controlling 78% of large amphitheaters, while linking that power to long‑term exclusive contracts, concert‑withholding concerns, and the leverage that flows from controlling the places artists most need to play.

Dr. Hill’s demonstratives from the Prosecution (Case file 1424-8)

Live Nation, unsurprisingly, is still trying to tear down every major beam in that structure. Its April 8 renewed Rule 50(a) motion and supporting brief asked for judgment as a matter of law on all remaining claims and attacked nearly every element of the states’ case: market definition, monopoly power, anticompetitive effects, exclusionary conduct, the large‑amphitheater claim, the tying claim, standing, state‑law theories, and damages. This is not a company seeking to modestly narrow a verdict around the edges. It is a company still arguing that the case largely should never have reached the jury at all.

But Monday’s order suggests there are limits to how much rhetorical flourish the court is willing to tolerate while those arguments are pending. Live Nation remains free to keep pressing its attack on Abrantes‑Metz and to pursue the rest of its post‑trial motions. What it does not appear free to do, at least before this judge, is package those arguments in overheated prose and expect the court to treat that performance as a substitute for patience or persuasion.

For now, the underlying motion remains unresolved. So does the broader Rule 50 fight. But one thing is already clear: Live Nation’s campaign to outlast or outmuscle this verdict has entered a phase where the company is not just arguing with the states or with the jury’s conclusions. It is also testing the court’s tolerance for the way it chooses to wage that fight. On Monday, the answer was not subtle.

Recent USA vs. Live Nation Entertainment Trial Coverage from TicketNews

– 4/16: Live Nation Responds to Monopoly Verdict With Defiance, Vows to Fight Jury Findings – 4/15: Live Nation/Ticketmaster Operate as an Illegal Monopoly, Jury Finds – 4/15: Dem. Senators Urge Strong Tunney Act Review of DOJ/Live Nation Settlement – 4/14: Verdict Watch Continues as Jury Deliberates in Live Nation Trial – 4/10: States Say LN Built ‘Moat Around the Castle’ in Closing Arguments – 4/9: Live Nation Mounts One Final Push to Kill Antitrust Case Before Jury Takes Over – 4/8: Antitrust Case Narrows as Plaintiffs Drop Standalone Exclusive-Dealing Claim – 4/7: Sanctions Fight Opens New Front in Live Nation-AEG War Over Concert Ticketing – 4/7: Trial nears endgame as states fight 50(a) motion, defend expert testimony – Earlier: Sanctions Sought After Unsealed AEG Email Raises New Questions in Antitrust Trial – Live Nation Seeks Pre‑Verdict 50(a) Win as Judge Orders More Trial Records Unsealed – Defense Continues Blame Shift, Seeks to Eliminate Prosecution Expert Testimony – Live Nation Leans on ‘Better Product’ Defense as States Press Vertical‑Integration Case – States Say Verified Fan Just a Sales Pitch; OVG Testifies to Undisclosed “Advocate” Payments – DOJ Defends its Settlement of Live Nation Case as “Blueprint” – Judge Demands DOJ/LN Settlement Details be Made Public, Promptly – Trump Personally Pressed for Settlement, Met With Rapino March 5 – After Rapino Fireworks, States Re-center Live Nation Trial on its Use of Leverage – States Put Live Nation’s Rapino at Center of Ticketmaster Strategy – Tech, Venue Leverage, and What Jurors May Not Hear Ahead of Rapino Testimony – Live Nation Trial Presses Fees, Conditioning, and Consent-Decree Questions