Ticket Price Caps Are Music to Live Nation’s Ears

Live Nation signage outside its office in Hollywood. The company reported revenue in excess of $23 billion last year. (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty Images)

About the author: Danielle Zanzalari*, Ph.D., is a financial economist specializing in regulatory economics and an assistant professor of economics at Seton Hall University.*

Live Nation , the parent of Ticketmaster, dominates live-event ticketing—controlling more than 80% of the primary market and moving tens of millions of tickets a year. But the industry giant still wants more.

It is trying to turn new ticket regulations, set to be recommended by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission this week, into a new weapon against consumers and its business rivals. It is urging Washington to impose a 20% price cap on ticket resales, arguing that would curb price gouging on the secondary market.

To a casual observer, this sounds like a win for consumers. In reality, it is classic rent-seeking.

The independent, secondary-market platforms that Live Nation-Ticketmaster compete with operate on resale margins. If resale prices are capped, those platforms won’t be able to cover their costs or earn margins. Without profit, their business models will collapse.

That is music to Live Nation’s ears. Unlike its competitors, Live Nation doesn’t depend on ticket fees alone. Some 85% of its revenue comes from concerts, sponsorships, venue operations, and other lines of business. In 2024, Live Nation reported $19 billion in concert revenue, versus roughly $3 billion from ticketing. This diversification means Live Nation can absorb losses under a price control regime while its smaller rivals, which are more tightly tied to ticket margins, would face financial trouble.

Driving independent resale platforms out of business with price controls would allow Live Nation to funnel more fans into its own resale marketplace, where it would collect fees twice—once on the initial sale and again on the resale. In other words, what looks like a safeguard is really an attempt to secure Live Nation’s monopoly power.

Regulatory favoritism has already tilted the playing field in Ticketmaster’s direction. Massachusetts, for example, passed a law last year restricting resales to primary platforms like Ticketmaster. Consumer groups have argued that the law is preventing consumers from continuing to save the $21 million they realized through independent resale marketplaces between 2017 to 2024. Expanding such favoritism with federal resale price controls would be doubling down on failure.

The irony is that price controls rarely cut costs and often make things worse. When governments clamp down, tickets don’t become cheaper. They just move off regulated and trackable platforms and onto street corners or offshore sites with no consumer protection. That is exactly what happened in Ireland after its 2021 Sales of Tickets Act banned resales above face value. Fraud complaints skyrocketed as criminal networks stepped in to supply tickets that legitimate resale platforms could no longer provide. France has faced a similar problem. Its restrictions on authorized resale outlets spawned hundreds of scam websites.

Big firms have long perfected the art of disguising self-interest as consumers’ interest. It is the same playbook that large telecommunications companies once used to lobby for “network management” rules that throttled online competitors and the same strategy pharmaceutical companies rely on to block lower-cost generics. The goal isn’t protection—it is protectionism.

Some insiders, such as Roger Alford, a lawyer who helped oversee antitrust policy at the DOJ until late July, have warned that powerful companies are eroding fair enforcement.

In a recent speech, Alford cautioned that the DOJ risks replacing the rule of law with the rule of lobbyists—where “cases are being resolved based on political connections, not the legal merits.” He singled out Live Nation-Ticketmaster as the case to watch. He wondered whether government officials might ignore the president’s order to reform ticket resales “just because Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls” of the DOJ.

Price controls won’t protect fans. They will only protect Live Nation, deepen its dominance, and fuel a larger black market.

Live Nation is already in the hot seat for its ticketing practices, with the FTC and seven states suing the entertainment giant last week on several claims, and the DOJ and 40 states doing the same last year. Live Nation denied those cases’ allegations of antitrust behavior.

If the Trump administration is serious about a correction, it should tear down barriers to entry that have solidified TicketMaster’s dominance and restore competition—ensuring fans, not entrenched corporate interests, come out ahead.

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