Live Nation Defense Continues Blame Shift to Rivals and Resale Market, Seeks to Eliminate Prosecution Expert Testimony
Live Nation’s antitrust defense is coming into sharper focus as the entertainment giant continues to roll out its argument in…
Live Nation’s antitrust defense is coming into sharper focus as the entertainment giant continues to roll out its argument in a New York courtroom this week. Faced with arguments that its overlapping power in concert promotion, venues, and ticketing make it impossible for competition to gain any meaningful foothold, its defense is to shift blame to other players.
It has laid a two-pronged strategy thus far in its defense, which continues Tuesday morning in the Southern District federal courtroom in Manhattan, At first, it laid out arguments that Ticketmaster dominantes because rival products are weaker. On Monday, it added a second thread – that the true market dysfunction consumers face is driven by the secondary market, rather than its own conduct in dominating every other relevant market, while remaining a strong share of a comparatively more competitive secondary ticketing business.
That strategy saw some friction on Monday. Live Nation’s own witness from Monumental Sports & Entertainment acknowledged both Ticketmaster’s benefits and the practical limits of the venue’s freedom to choose another provider, while the company’s expert economist, Eric Budish, moved to cast resale-market actors as the real source of harm in live entertainment even as plaintiffs prepared to defend their own damages case against a fresh effort to knock it out.
Together, the testimony suggested a defense case trying to redirect the jury’s attention away from the structural monopoly story the states spent weeks building — and toward a more familiar one in which Ticketmaster is simply the best product in a flawed marketplace.
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Monumental helps Live Nation make its “better product” case — but also exposes the limits of that argument
Live Nation called Jim Van Stone, president of business operations and chief commercial officer at Monumental Sports & Entertainment, to help validate one of the defense’s central themes: that Ticketmaster holds onto business because venues genuinely prefer it.
Van Stone described Ticketmaster as a “great business partner” that had met Monumental’s needs and said the company believed an exclusive relationship with Ticketmaster was better for its business. He also testified that Ticketmaster outperformed rivals from both a technological and customer-service standpoint, and that the company’s operations helped Monumental drive sponsorship revenue.
At one level, that is exactly the testimony Live Nation wants jurors to hear. If sophisticated venue operators are voluntarily choosing Ticketmaster because they think it works better, the defense can argue that the company’s market position reflects merit rather than coercion.
But the cross-examination appears to have complicated that story.
During cross examination Van Stone was questioned about a 2015 internal Monumental slide deck weighing the “pros and cons” of Ticketmaster, and he acknowledged that one major benefit of choosing Ticketmaster was access to concerts promoted by Live Nation. He also conceded that Monumental was “limited to using Ticketmaster” even if a better primary ticketer became available.
He was also asked during cross examination about leaning on friends at Ticketmaster for tickets to shows he personally wanted to attend.
That matters because it cuts directly against the cleanest version of the defense narrative. The states’ theory has never been that Ticketmaster survives solely because its software is inferior or because no one likes it. Their theory is that Live Nation’s integrated structure makes the ticketing choice hard to separate from everything else the company controls — especially access to content.
Van Stone’s testimony appears to reinforce that point even while trying to rebut it. Ticketmaster may be preferred by some venue operators. But if one of the reasons it is preferred is its connection to Live Nation’s promotion engine, the defense is no longer describing a simple market contest over who built the best ticketing tool.
The defense’s second theory is coming into view: blame the resale market
If the first stage of Live Nation’s defense has been to praise Ticketmaster’s product, the second is becoming clearer: tell jurors that the real distortion in the market comes from brokers, bots, and resale, not from Live Nation’s own dominance.
That case was advanced most directly through Eric Budish, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor testifying as a defense expert. Budish told jurors that Ticketmaster keeps only a small slice of the total economics of a ticket sale — about $5 out of a hypothetical $100 ticket, by his account — and described scalpers and secondary-market interference as a “profound source of market failure.”
He also pointed to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour as an example of how lucrative resale opportunities create a kind of bullseye for bad actors. In Budish’s telling, the biggest problem in the ticket market is not the company at the center of it, but the outside actors trying to exploit it.
That is a strategically important shift. It offers jurors an alternative villain.
Rather than answer the states’ broad monopoly case head-on — that Live Nation’s overlapping control of venues, promotion, and ticketing distorts competition — the defense is increasingly trying to relocate the source of harm somewhere else. In that framing, fans are angry not because Ticketmaster is dominant, but because bots and resellers stand between artists and consumers.
The problem for Live Nation is that this argument does not emerge in a vacuum. The states have already spent substantial trial time arguing that Ticketmaster and Live Nation benefited from the very market dysfunction they now describe as external, whether through fees, exclusivity, resale positioning, or consumer-friction products like Verified Fan.
That makes Budish’s testimony more than just expert analysis. It is an attempt to rewrite causation.
Budish’s credibility fight began before his theory was fully on the table
The states also appear to have opened their attack on Budish before his broader story could settle with jurors.
Budish acknowledged on cross-examination that he has been paid more than $1 million by Live Nation for his work in the case, billing at $1,150 per hour while also receiving a share tied to work done by his consultancy, Cornerstone Research.
That does not by itself disqualify expert testimony; high-dollar experts are common in complex antitrust cases. But it does give plaintiffs an obvious way to frame his conclusions for jurors: before the defense expert could fully persuade the jury that resale is the real culprit, the states had already put a price tag on who was paying to tell that story.
The cross also appears to have created a second vulnerability. Budish reportedly acknowledged having written in the past that Ticketmaster had outsized market power during the Eras Tour fiasco, and he was further confronted with internal Ticketmaster materials acknowledging that some of the company’s own tools were unreliable and that abuse in ticket sales had not been a priority from an investment standpoint.
So even as Budish tried to shift blame outward, the states were using both his prior writing and Ticketmaster’s own records to argue that the company understood its own power — and its own weaknesses — perfectly well.
That combination could prove significant. A defense expert arguing that resale is the real problem is more useful when he appears neutral, detached, and consistent. It is less useful when plaintiffs can depict him as highly paid, selectively framed, and in tension with both prior commentary and internal company documents.
The Abrantes-Metz fight shows why this shift matters
The defense’s evolving argument is also inseparable from its effort to weaken the states’ damages case.
As Live Nation pushes the idea that resale and bots are the true drivers of market pain, it is also trying to undercut testimony from plaintiffs’ damages expert Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz — a fight that has itself become difficult for the public to follow because so much of the relevant briefing is sealed or heavily obscured.
That matters for more than procedural reasons. If Live Nation can convince jurors that resale-market dysfunction is the real problem while simultaneously shrinking or discrediting the states’ proof of ticketing-related damages, it can move the case toward a much more favorable frame: not monopoly harm, but market chaos caused by others.
In that sense, the Budish testimony and the Abrantes-Metz fight are not separate stories. They are two parts of the same defense strategy.
One part offers a replacement explanation for why fans and venues are unhappy. The other tries to limit the states’ ability to quantify the consequences of the explanation they have offered instead.
And because much of that dispute remains buried in sealed filings and redacted materials, it also fits the broader pattern that has increasingly shadowed the trial: a case nominally about public harm to consumers, but one in which a remarkable volume of the most consequential evidence is being kept from public view.
Live Nation is not just defending itself — it is trying to redefine the market’s core problem
What Monday made clearer is that Live Nation’s defense is not simply rebutting discrete allegations from the states. It is trying to redefine the entire problem the jury thinks it is there to solve.
If the states’ case says Live Nation’s dominance created the conditions for excessive fees, weak competition, and limited venue choice, then the defense response now seems to be: competitors are weaker than Ticketmaster, venues choose exclusivity because it works, and the real source of consumer pain is resale-market interference.
That is a more ambitious story than “we did nothing wrong.” It is a story that attempts to turn the market’s most visible frustrations into evidence of someone else’s misconduct.
The remaining question is whether jurors will see that as a persuasive explanation — or as an effort to redirect blame away from the company whose power over the live-entertainment ecosystem has been the centerpiece of the trial from the start.
As the defense case continues, that appears to be the contest taking shape: not just over facts, but over what kind of market this jury believes it is looking at.
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