In a year-long review closely watched for signs of the direction the Obama administration’s antitrust regulators will take, the Justice Department has signed off, with changes, on the merger between ticket giant Ticketmaster and concert promoter Live Nation.
In order to clear regulatory approval, the combined firm agreed to license its ticketing software, divest some ticketing assets, and refrain from bundling tickets with other services in an anticompetitive way, retaliating against venues that choose other ticketing services, or using consumer data in to gain an unfair advantage in its promotion business, according to documents filed today in federal court in Washington, D.C.
“We were prepared to litigate the case, and I told the parties that,” Varney said in a briefing with reporters Monday. “The linked structural and behavioral remedies in this settlement preserve and protect competition, while allowing the parties to achieve any consumer benefits that are associated with the merger.”
Read the DOJ news release here. View documents related to the proposed settlement here.
We’ll update this report with more information later.
