Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

I think you either missed the point or are intentionally sidestepping the point. If I have a favorite band and they're reasonably large and I want to go see them live, it'd be a bonafide miracle if their show wasn't at a LiveNation venue. The local spots are simply too small to be a reasonable stop on tour for any moderately popular artist.

I agree that you should definitely go see local artists at local venues, but you can do that and still really want to take your dad to see Steve Hackett play a live show. It's not up to you to decide what enriches my life.

> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company.

The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem.

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform.

The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse.

> I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction.

Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business.

There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.

> Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds?

There are laws against transfer bans. Also, people don't like being required to provide identity information just to buy a ticket to a live event, and venues HATE enforcing identity checks.

...and you'd be surprised how often you can get a refund on tickets just by asking your venue for a refund.

> First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.

Now you've opened the debate about how to determine which fans are the most passionate and attentive... ;-) Ticketmaster has a service for this that attempts to address this called Verified Fan.

> They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market.

That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.

> If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed.

This is more why DOJ cases should remain independent from the executive branch. Politically controlled prosecutions means justice is intrinsically unequal. Having states be independent is helpful, but not in this regard.