Mr. Shachtman, a contributing Opinion writer, is a former editor in chief of Rolling Stone.
For a hot second there, it looked as if the government might pry loose Live Nation's chokehold on the American concert business. Live Nation Entertainment is the company that brought you $5,000 Springsteen tickets and V.I.P. packages at Beyoncé concerts with $550 in fees alone, and it did it by controlling every aspect of live music, from the tickets sold to the artists promoted to venues themselves -- an over-$20 billion-per-year global empire spanning 54,000 events a year and 394 halls as of late 2024.
Music fans often have no alternatives, a fact that some company representatives seem to revel in. "I almost feel bad taking advantage of them," one Live Nation ticketing director wrote over Slack as a colleague discussed charging $250 for V.I.P. parking at a Kid Rock show.
It was the kind of attitude that drove many voters to support Donald Trump, with his promise to stand up for ordinary Americans and to lower out-of-control prices. In office, President Trump signed an executive order to crack down on price-gouging by ticket resellers and looked on as Kid Rock said that Ticketmaster, Live Nation's selling platform, was "going to lose some money." Most important, the Trump Justice Department pushed ahead with a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation that had been filed in 2024 by the Biden administration and ultimately joined by 39 states and the District of Columbia.
Which is why it came as such a shock last week when, just a week after the case went to trial, the Justice Department announced it was all but surrendering, folding its case with a settlement tilted far in Live Nation's favor. Negotiations between the two sides had been underway for weeks, but the outcome was so abrupt that the state attorneys general who had brought the suit were taken by surprise; so, too, apparently was the lead lawyer arguing the case for the Department of Justice.
Judge Arun Subramanian, who had dealt the government a blow some weeks prior when he limited the scope of its case, was flabbergasted. When he found out that the Justice Department had ambushed its own side, he expressed disbelief that the man arguing the government's case was out of the loop: "You are the lead counsel for the United States," he said to the lawyer. "You didn't receive this term sheet until I asked for it at 6:30 in the morning?"
Kid Rock was shocked, too. "I don't understand why they would negotiate a settlement," he told me. "Why not just let it see its course? Let's see what 12 people decide."