Photo Credit: A Minnesota Wild game by Jenn G / CC by 4.0
Former BSE Global CEO John Abbamondi isn’t the only one to deliver testimony that Live Nation retaliated when his venue explored a competing proposal. Here’s the latest.
With the federal antitrust trial against Live Nation and Ticketmaster in full swing, venue owners are testifying that Live Nation weaponized major tour dates to keep them from switching their ticketing to a competitor.
Yesterday, Digital Music News covered testimony from former BSE Global CEO John Abbamondi relating to a planned Billie Eilish show at the Barclays Center that Live Nation allegedly rug-pulled. Now, Mitch Helgerson, Chief Revenue Officer for the Minnesota Wild, has lobbed similar allegations against the live events juggernaut.
According to Helgerson, when his venue explored a proposal from Live Nation competitor SeatGeek during contract negotiations, a Ticketmaster executive warned him that Live Nation could just move its shows to a competing venue. Helgerson called this a “credible threat,” and noted that losing those shows would have been “catastrophic.”
When SeatGeek heard the news, they were apparently keenly aware of Live Nation’s strategy, offering the Wild what it literally referred to as “Live Nation retaliation insurance”—that is, a promise to compensate the venue if concerts were pulled.
But even with that offer, and even though the SeatGeek proposal would have raked in an additional million dollars a year for the venue, the Wild hockey team ultimately chose to stay with Ticketmaster.
Still, the most damning part is that if SeatGeek has a policy it refers to, even colloquially, as “Live Nation retaliation insurance,” then the company’s reputation as a “monopoly” seems correctly placed.
Of course, Live Nation has fervently pushed back against these allegations, and the similar ones posited by Abbamondi. On cross-examination, there was a lot of emphasis on the complexity of switching ticketing platforms, that SeatGeek “had real usability shortcomings,” and that in Abbamondi’s case he already had personal relationships with SeatGeek execs.
However, none of this explains why the Billie Eilish show in New York ended up 20 miles away after so-called thinly veiled threats from Live Nation-Ticketmaster. Nor does it explain why the Minnesota Wild would leave a million dollars a year on the table, if not out of fear of retaliation.
It’s only been the first week of the trial, which is expected to last about six weeks. Time will tell if the jury ultimately agrees with the government’s assertion that Live Nation has, in fact, become such a dominant force that it can essentially bully the rest of the industry into taking a knee. But if Abbamondi and Helgerson’s testimonies are any indication, the first week isn’t looking too good for Live Nation.
