Senate inquisition of Ticketmaster is antitrust theater

Ginny via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Inquisition of Ticketmaster in the Senate last week made headlines, but it's so much antitrust theater, and Ticketmaster and parent Live Nation know it.

Senators love to play hard-nosed before the cameras, and then assiduously do nothing to alienate the corporatocracy. Breathless reporting on the hearing in the Judiciary Committee would have you believe that this is Ticketmaster's first dance. It's not.

The Justice Department signed off on Ticketmaster's very merger with Live Nation in 2010 (N.Y. Times). The N.Y. Times Dealbook Newsletter further recalled:

In 2019, [Sen. Amy] Klobuchar [D-Minn.] and Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, urged the Justice Department to investigate the "broken" ticket industry.

Artists have long complained about Ticketmaster’s role. The band Lawrence, whose co-founder, Clyde Lawrence, wrote a Times Opinion essay on the topic last year, included the line "Live Nation is a monopoly" in its 2021 song "False Alarms." Perhaps most famously, Pearl Jam filed an antitrust complaint against Ticketmaster in 1994—16 years before it merged with Live Nation—kicking off a federal investigation that ultimately fizzled.

(Read more about the Pearl Jam claim from Rolling Stone in 1995. (UPDATE, Feb. 5: On the Media looked back at the Pearl Jam matter two days ago.)) House Democrats asked the Biden Administration to take another look at the Live Nation merger in the spring of 2021, well before the Taylor Swift ticketing fiasco (N.Y. Post).

Founded in 1976, Ticketmaster was on its way to market dominance and a lousy reputation with concertgoers by the time I was a teenager. Already transnational, it took the market lead when it acquired Ticketron in 1991.

Live Nation was once a growing competitor to behemoth Ticketmaster. In 2000, Live Nation was acquired by Clear Channel Communications, and then was spun off in 2005. It soon started work on the Ticketmaster merger, which was announced in 2009 and approved by the Obama Justice Department in 2010.

Clear Channel itself is another chapter in the government's pathetically permissive record of antitrust enforcement in media and entertainment. In 2001, Jesse Morreale, a Colorado concert promoter (and my first cousin), along with partners in Nobody in Particular Presents, Inc., sued Clear Channel for shameless vertical integration in the music business.  The federal district court in Denver denied Clear Channel summary judgment in 2004 (more behind pay wall at Rolling Stone). The case subsequently settled. Clear Channel's vertical integration was a more sophisticated descendant of simple payola, an unfair practice in the music industry as old as regulatory agencies themselves. 

It's a normal market dynamic for industry and antitrust regulators to play a cat-and-mouse game over the long term. But Ticketmaster has been only a clever Jerry to the government's buffoonish Tom for going on half a century.

Let's laugh at them, not with them: Klobuchar cites serious stats, but occasions levity in Jackson hearing

On day 2 of the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) borrowed a joke from The Daily Show's Trevor Noah.

Klobuchar remarked on the significance of a woman taking a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court to attain a 5-4 gender balance for the first time.  Of 115 confirmed justices in American history, Klobuchar counted, 110 have been men.  Klobuchar said that she had "reminded" Trevor Noah on The Daily Show of similar statistics relative to service in the U.S. Senate: "Of the nearly 2,000 people who have served, only 58 have been women.  And he responded that if a night club had numbers that bad, they'd shut it down."  Here's the 38-second clip:

It was Noah who actually quoted the Senate statistic from a book, Nevertheless, We Persisted (2018), an anthology for which Klobuchar wrote a foreword and which she touted at the time. Noah followed up, "I've been to gay clubs that have better ratios of men to women."  Klobuchar took the occasion in 2018 to speak against the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, pending at the time.  She put the appearance on Facebook.

Klobuchar appeared on The Daily Show also in 2017 and in 2019, the latter while running for President.  But none of those appearances marks the funniest intersection of Klobuchar and Noah in popular culture.  That honor goes to a 2019 tweet by Noah in which he lampooned Klobuchar for overusing a joke on the campaign trail.

Amy Klobuchar has a joke she'd like you to hear pic.twitter.com/5mh5IQepva

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) September 6, 2019

Senators' interrogations of Jackson on Tuesday and Wednesday this week were at times cringeworthy, to use my wife's word.  In particular, the questioning by Senators Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) were difficult to endure; even National Review Senior Fellow Andrew C. McCarthy, who opposes Jackson's appointment on other grounds, described Hawley's attack as "meritless."  The affair rubs in for me David Brooks's recent lament in The Atlantic on the divide between today's rabid right and the meritorious social value of genuine conservatism.

Both Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah are off this week, so between the stresses of a contentious Senate hearing and the ongoing war in Ukraine, I am sorely missing my daily doses of escapist levity. Fortunately, The Daily Show's Desi Lydic deposited a dose of satire on the web for us; don't miss it.