{"id":3489,"date":"2025-07-09T00:18:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T00:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/live-nation-threat-indie-venues-scalping-niva-letter\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T00:18:19","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T00:18:19","slug":"live-nation-threat-indie-venues-scalping-niva-letter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/live-nation-threat-indie-venues-scalping-niva-letter\/","title":{"rendered":"NIVA Says Live Nation a Bigger Threat to Indie Venues Than Scalpers in Letter to FTC,\u00a0DOJ"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tLive Nation poses more of a threat to independent promoters and venues than scalpers, officials with the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) told the Trump administration in an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday (July 7).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe letter follows a call for public comment from the two agencies in the wake of an executive order by President Trump earlier this year aimed at addressing long-standing consumer complaints about the event ticketing business. While both Live Nation and NIVA submitted lengthy responses urging Congress to pass a slate of reform packages targeting often criticized practices in the ticket resale business, NIVA officials also included several criticisms of Live Nation in its letter, calling for the company to be broken up and forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually in legal settlements.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"National<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tThe Majority of Independent Music Venues Were Not Profitable in 2024, According to New\u00a0Report\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tIn his letter to the FTC and DOJ, NIVA executive director Stephen Parker<\/strong> accused Live Nation of using its vertically integrated \u201cflywheel\u201d model to outbid independent concert promoters for artist tours, knowing that the money the company loses on the concert business will be made up from revenue from ticketing fees, venue ownership, artist management fees, merchandise sales and advertising and sponsorship packages it sells to major brands. Parker called Live Nation\u2019s market power a \u201cdirect result of a policy failure in 2010, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) allowed the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster,\u201d adding that the DOJ\u2019s lawsuit against Live Nation filed in May 2024 represented an opportunity to \u201ccorrect this error and deliver structural change that should have been required fifteen years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNotably, NIVA\u2019s hard line against Live Nation comes as the concert promotion giant fights for its survival in U.S. District court after the Department of Justice<\/a> and 40 states attorneys general<\/a> brought suit against the company last year on charges that the company acted monopolistically and used its scale to unfairly compete in the concert promotion market.<\/p>\n

\n\tLater in the letter, Parker pointed to Live Nation\u2019s artist management business, which he claims gives \u201cits promotions division the right of first refusal\u201d to directly submit offers to the biggest artists in the industry. He also accused the company of unfairly enforcing its radius clauses, punishing artists who opt to work with independent promoters and \u201cdemanding to be added as a \u2018co-promoter\u2019 on shows it had no involvement in booking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe National Independent Venue Association 2025 State of Live report paints a stark picture of what independent venues face,\u201d Parker\u2019s letter continued, referring to NIVA\u2019s first-ever comprehensive national economic impact study released last month<\/a>. \u201cDespite hosting more than 153,000 events, serving 183.7 million fans, and driving $10.6 billion in off-site tourism spending and $19.3 billion in tax revenue, 64% of independent venues were unprofitable in 2024, and nearly one-quarter struggled just to stay open.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tLive Nation Revenue Down in Q1, But Metrics Point to a Strong\u00a02025\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tAlong with calling for the forced divestiture of Live Nation into four separate companies, Parker wants Live Nation to pay into a \u201clong-term fund of $300\u2013$500 million annually for at least 15 years, financed through settlement contributions, disgorgement, or performance-based revenue shares,\u201d adding that the fund \u201cwould support capital investment, marketing support, and operational sustainability for small and mid-sized independent venues, festivals, and promoters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn their own letter to the FTC and DOJ, Live Nation officials refuted NIVA\u2019s claims about the company\u2019s impact on independent promoters and outlined their own recommendations for cleaning up the live events industry \u2014 namely, by cracking down on the secondary ticketing business.<\/p>\n

\n\tLive Nation\u2019s recommendations include giving artists \u201cthe exclusive rights to decide if, when and how their tickets can be resold\u201d and capping the amount of money a scalper can charge fans to no more than 20% above face value (in Parker\u2019s letter, he says NIVA wants resale capped at 10%). <\/p>\n

\n\tIn the letter, Live Nation officials further stated that the growing resale market wasn\u2019t only being driven by automated bots, noting that \u201cone underappreciated method is the use of automation to create thousands of \u2018synthetic\u2019 accounts, meaning primary ticketing accounts that appear to be normal fan accounts but are actually controlled by ticket brokers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMore than 80,000 new accounts are created every day at Ticketmaster, according to Live Nation\u2019s letter, which continues that \u201cthere is strong evidence that a significant portion of new accounts are bad actors generating fake accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tLive Nation Elects Trump Appointee Richard Grenell to Its Board of\u00a0Directors\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tLive Nation has experienced recent cyber attacks, the letter explains, including more than 25 million daily attempts to create fake accounts, sometimes by non-public IP addresses making more than 10,000 attempts at a time.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cScalpers rely on a low success rate to end up with banks of fake accounts,\u201d the letter continues, adding that the burden \u201cfalls on Ticketmaster to identify and weed out the fake accounts. We are increasingly able to do so, but no one should be happy about a system that permits rogue actors to bombard primary tickets systems with fake accounts, bots, and all the rest, and then relies on the ticketing companies to clean up the mess.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Live Nation poses more of a threat to independent promoters and venues than scalpers, officials with the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) told the Trump administration in an open letter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[387,451,94,450],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-live-nation","category-music-news","category-touring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}