Ticket buyers have known it for years. On 16 April 2026, a federal jury in Manhattan made it official: Live Nation Entertainment and its subsidiary Ticketmaster operated as an illegal monopoly that systematically overcharged consumers for live event tickets.
The verdict, delivered in the Southern District of New York after a six-week trial, finds that Live Nation violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by using its simultaneous dominance over concert venues, ticketing platforms, and artist management to lock out competitors and extract excess fees from fans who had no realistic alternative. The jury also found that Ticketmaster's exclusive venue contracts — which had been a target of federal antitrust scrutiny for more than a decade — constituted anticompetitive conduct that "materially harmed" consumers.
The verdict caps a legal challenge that accelerated significantly in May 2024, when the Department of Justice, joined by 30 state attorneys general, filed suit in the Eastern District of Virginia alleging Live Nation had abused its structural market position. Live Nation controls approximately 265 venues in North America, manages over 500 artists through its Label, Roc Nation, and Vector Management partnerships, and processes more than 620 million tickets annually through Ticketmaster — a combination of scale and integration that plaintiffs argued made it effectively impossible for fans to avoid the company regardless of the show they wanted to attend.
