The U.S. Department of Justice is finally taking action against Ticketmaster!

On Thursday, the DOJ announced its filing an antitrust suit against Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, alleging it’s a monopoly (it is) and trying to force the company to break up (it should).

“It is time for fans and artists to stop paying the price for Live Nation’s monopoly,” Attorney General Merrick Garland, said, according to the New York Times. “It is time to break up Live Nation/Ticketmaster. The American people are ready for it.”

This has been a long time coming, to say the least. Bands have been getting screwed by and fighting Ticketmaster for over 30 years. So join me in reviewing the long, winding road that got us, finally, to this point.

Pearl Jam — “Alive”

As far as I can tell, the first band to really go all-in on its opposition to Ticketmaster was Pearl Jam, in the early ’90s.

The feud began when Pearl Jam performed a free Labor Day concert for fans in Seattle, and Ticketmaster wanted to charge them $1 per ticket in fees. For the free tickets. Later the band capped fees at $1.80 (the equivalent of $3.86 today) when Ticketmaster usually charged $4 to $8 ($8.50 to $17).

Ticketmaster responded by essentially strong-arming venues and promoters to not book Pearl Jam, then one of the biggest bands in the world. That became such a big deal that in 1994, Congress tried to pass the Pearl Jam Bill, requiring ticket brokers to clearly print fees on the receipt. The bill died in 1995, giving Ticketmaster a huge victory, but a version eventually passed… last week.

The String Cheese Incident — “Lost”

Colorado jam band The String Cheese Incident did the usual jam band thing by fostering a direct connection with its passionate fans, and part of that was selling tickets to shows direct and at face value. Ticketmaster, of course, couldn’t have that.

In 2002, Ticketmaster responded to this act of fan appreciation with a strict crackdown on tickets sold by the band, which it limited to 8 percent. So the band sued, alleging that unilaterally capping tickets the band could sell was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Which… I mean, it really, really is. Using market power to impose restrictions is one of the reasons it exists.

After a couple years, they settled the lawsuit. The String Cheese Incident got five years where it could sell far more than 8 percent, and Ticketmaster got a non-disclosure agreement preventing the band from giving specifics about the terms. Obviously, after those five years, Ticketmaster reimposed the limit, so the band responded by sending its fans to buy the maximum number of tickets with cash from venue box offices, buying those fans’ spare tickets at face value and reselling them to other fans at face value. Just brilliant.

Bruce Springsteen — “The Ghost of Tom Joad”

This story is in two parts. It’s a bit of a rollercoaster.

Bruce Springsteen is, of course, a legend, and he has fans so passionate it makes jam band fans look like dilettantes. In 2009, Ticketmaster directed fans to buy tickets from a part of its site for resellers, rather than allowing them to buy the still-available face-value tickets. This put more money in Ticketmaster’s pockets. Fans were livid. And Springsteen, champion of the working man, had their backs. He had a talk with Ticketmaster’s then-CEO, and the CEO apologized to everyone affected.

Flash forward to 2022. Bruce is on tour again. This time, he opts into Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing, which is like surge pricing from Uber. Basically if a show is popular, the ticket prices algorithmically go up pretty much indefinitely. This led to face-value tickets to a Springsteen show going for $5,000. Did he sit the latest CEO back down and teach him a thing or two? Well… no.

“In pricing tickets for this tour, we looked carefully at what our peers have been doing,” Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau told the New York Times. “Regardless of the commentary about a modest number of tickets costing $1,000 or more, our true average ticket price has been in the mid-$200 range. I believe that in today’s environment, that is a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.”

We believed in you, man! Tom Morello believed in you!

The Cure — “Friday I’m in Love”

You may be wondering why ’80s goth legends The Cure are after Bruce in 2022. Well, because this happened in 2023.

For The Cure’s first tour in a while, frontman Robert Smith wanted to keep ticket prices as low as possible. The band made tickets non-transferrable to stop scalping, it limited premium pricing and it even one-upped The Boss and refused dynamic pricing. Unfortunately, Ticketmaster didn’t get the memo.

See, while The Cure wanted ticket prices to be low for its fans, Ticketmaster clearly doesn’t care about any of that, so it kept the fees the same. That means in many cases, Ticketmaster’s fees were higher than the actual price of a ticket. Remember when Ticketmaster refused to lower fees for Pearl Jam  tickets from $8.50 to $4? That was so long ago.

What TM didn’t bank on was Robert Smith. Never, ever bet against a man who’s still goth into his mid-60s. He got so vocal and so aggressive that Ticketmaster actually caved slightly: People who bought the cheapest tickets got $10 back, and everyone else got $5. Not a lot but, hey, it’s the most the fans have gotten so far!

That bit of good news lasted for a whopping five days.

Despite the refunds, a fan tweeted a photo of his receipt showing that his $20 ticket came with $27 in fees. See Smith’s tweet to see how well he took that.

Taylor Swift — “Bad Blood”

Pearl Jam couldn’t stop it. Bruce Springsteen couldn’t stop it. Aging goths couldn’t stop it. Ticketmaster easily cleared a series of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. World-famous rock stars using the full force of their celebrity to pressure it into changing its policies; no problem. The United States House of Representatives, child’s play.

Ticketmaster got cocky. It had reason to be cocky. But eventually, it ran into a force even more powerful than the United States government and Springsteen fans combined.

They ran into Taylor Swift.

When Swift announced the Eras Tour, a full-blown cultural phenomenon that dominated discourse for pretty much the entirety of 2023, everyone had to go through Ticketmaster’s monopoly to get in. Fans waited up to eight hours in an online queue for tickets, and those were the lucky ones who didn’t get unceremoniously kicked out of the virtual line. Parents were frustrated; kids were disappointed. It was an absolute disaster.

Worst of all for Ticketmaster, though, is that Taylor Swift was disappointed. And she voiced her disapproval, publicly and privately. Keep in mind the album she was touring, Midnights, at one point accounted for the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100; she commanded a legion of extremely devoted, extremely online fans, many of whom were teens and preteens with lots of free time.

Ticketmaster had met its match. Elected officials at all levels of government expressed their displeasure. The House passed the TICKET Act, essentially the Pearl Jam Act from 30 years prior. And, finally, the Attorney General agrees with The String Cheese Incident and is enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act.

So please, Taylor Swift, use your power well. Break up Amazon and Disney next.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and send column ideas to him at @bayareadata.press on BlueSky.