Why Live Nation’s grip on the music industry is so hard to break
Early one morning in 2005, the Competition Authority rushed through the doors of Ticketmaster’s Irish offices. “They burst in and said they could confine us to the office and we couldn’t move,” said Tommy Higgins, the former head of Ticketmaster Europe who brought the company to Ireland.
The dawn raid would lead to a two-year investigation costing Ticketmaster in excess of €500,000 in legal fees, according to Higgins. It eventually concluded that Ticketmaster had not abused its dominant position in the market. Five years later the authority also blessed the merger of Ticketmaster with the giant US concert promoter and venue owner Live Nation, only for the newly formed Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) to launch another investigation into anti competitive practices in 2017.