Subject index
Live Nation & Ticketmaster
A maintained index of Live Index research touching market structure, ticketing and fees, promotion and venue control, artist leverage and the federal series that describe the same conditions.
Maintained tracker
Live Nation–Ticketmaster Antitrust Case Tracker
Timeline, verdict, settlement, remedies and divestiture proposals in United States et al. v. Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster, maintained from primary court filings and official state releases.
Scope
Live Nation Entertainment operates across three activities that are usually studied separately: promoting tours, operating and booking venues, and — through Ticketmaster — selling primary tickets. Work about any one of those activities is incomplete without the other two, because the economics of a show are set by decisions that cross all three. This index exists so that the pieces Live Index has published on promotion, ticketing, venue control and artist leverage can be read as one body of work rather than as separate articles arriving in publication order.
The entries below are research and reference documents already published on this site. Each section states what it covers and lists the documents that address it; where a document appears in more than one section, it is because it genuinely treats both subjects. No summary judgement is offered here, and no market-share figure, legal finding or company disclosure is asserted on this page. Claims of that kind belong in the individual documents, where they carry their sources, their observation periods and their limits.
Federal statistics are listed alongside the research for the same reason they appear on the underlying pages: they describe national conditions — admission prices, live-event employment, promoter-sector pay — that any account of the industry has to be consistent with. They are broader than the companies discussed here and none of them isolates a single firm. They are useful as constraints on an argument, not as evidence about a particular company.
This index is updated when a document is published, revised or withdrawn. It is a reading path, not a campaign, and it is maintained under the same editorial and corrections standards as everything else Live Index publishes.
Market structure
How promotion, ticketing and venue control fit together, and what integration across them does to the economics of a show.
The Live Nation Flywheel: How Consolidation Actually Works
Promotion, ticketing, venues and sponsorship reinforce each other inside one company. The FY2025 filing shows the mechanism in reported operating scale.
How Much of the Live-Music Business Does Live Nation Actually Control?
Ownership, operation, lease, booking, promotion, ticketing contract and management are different relationships. Collapsing them into one market share produces a number nobody can verify.
When Does Scale Become Market Power?
Being large is not an offence. The line is whether scale is used to exclude rivals — and in August 2026 that line sits in a proposed consent judgment, not a verdict.
Who Controls America’s Live Music Rooms?
Venue control is six different relationships, not one. What Live Nation's 2025 10-K, AEG, ASM Global, OVG and NIVA disclosures actually establish — and why no national market share can be computed.
If Live Nation Is Broken Up, Who Actually Benefits?
A jury has found liability and states have asked for divestiture. Structural remedies would redistribute leverage, but not every driver of what a fan pays sits inside Ticketmaster.
What Would a Ticketmaster Divestiture Actually Change?
Separating primary ticketing from promotion and venues would move some decisions and leave others in place. This is an operating analysis of which contracts, data and switching costs would survive.
Ticketing and fees
What a buyer pays above the face price, who receives it, and the conditions under which an artist can sell tickets elsewhere.
The Ticket Fee Stack, Line by Line
Service fees, facility charges, order processing, taxes, delivery and premium pricing, with the FTC all-in disclosure rule now in force. What is documented and what is not.
When Will Artists Route Around Ticketmaster?
Robert Smith, Ariana Grande and Jon Bellion each pushed on a different part of the ticketing stack. What each case shows about the cost of leaving it.
Artist Ticketing Control Matrix
An evidence log of specific, publicly documented controls artists have exercised over how their tickets are priced, allocated, transferred and resold.
Measuring concert ticket price inflation without measuring the wrong thing
Why headline ticket price figures mislead, and how Live Index constructs a price index that separates face value, fees and resale.
Why Buying Concert Tickets Early Can Cost You More
Presale urgency no longer reliably delivers the lowest price. A framework for measuring what a comparable seat costs at each stage between announcement and doors.
Promotion and venues
Independent promoters and venue operators working inside the same routing and inventory system.
The Independent Promoter Margin Problem
Guarantees, rent, production, labour, marketing, insurance, card and ticketing costs and settlement timing decide a show's economics. Why no standardized promoter P&L exists.
America’s Broken Venue Ladder
Whether an artist can graduate from 300 to 5,000 capacity in a market depends on which rooms exist. There is no national capacity census, and that absence is the story.
Venue Exclusivity and Ticketing Contracts: What the Public Record Shows
Exclusivity, term length, advances and switching costs shape which platform sells a venue's tickets. Most agreements are private; this sets out what public documents do and do not establish.
The Touring Middle Is Getting Crushed
Clubs and theaters between 500 and 5,000 capacity carry rising fixed costs against a ticket price ceiling. What public data shows, and the margin dataset that does not exist.
Grassroots venue loss is an inventory problem, not a news cycle
Why counting venue closures misses the point, and how a room-level capacity inventory changes what the data can tell cities.
Fan data and platform control
Who holds the record of a ticket purchase, and what that ownership is worth in later transactions.
Who Owns the Fan?
Nobody owns a fan. What differs between integrated and independent operators is who can observe, retain and act on the transaction record — and that difference is contractual.
Touring and festival supply
Where headliner scarcity and routing decisions interact with the structure above.
The Headliner Inventory Problem
Riot Fest, Aftershock and Lollapalooza 2026 top lines, with sourced debut years and career ages: is the live business replacing festival headliners fast enough?
Market gravity: why some cities are routinely skipped
A routing model that estimates the pull each market exerts, and identifies cities systematically underserved relative to their fundamentals.
The Live Music Pulse: 2026 Baseline
A first recurring baseline of separately published indicators for U.S. live music: admissions prices, performing arts employment, promoter wages, and the gaps.
Are Superstar Tours Hollowing Out Live Music?
The largest tours have never grossed more. Whether that draws spending, calendar capacity and attention away from smaller tiers is a mechanism that can be specified and tested, not a proven finding.