Can Australian Music Survive in the Age of Spotify?
Australia and New Zealand’s live music industries have watched the United States antitrust proceedings against Live Nation and Ticketmaster with considerable interest. Live Nation operates extensively in this country, and whatever structural norms are established in the world’s largest live entertainment market inevitably shape expectations, business practices, and competitive pressures in markets like ours. That is why the settlement announced in March 2026, reached while a federal trial was already underway in Manhattan, deserves more than a passing glance from Australian operators.
When the US Department Of Justice (DOJ) and Live Nation announced their agreement, many in the live music industry breathed a cautious sigh of relief. The concern was that a full trial, if lost by the government, would have handed Live Nation a legal vindication that emboldened the company globally and made future regulatory action far more difficult to mount. A settlement, even an imperfect one, at least locked in some constraints: a cap on service fees at certain venues, requirements for Ticketmaster to allow rival platforms to list tickets, limits on the length of exclusivity contracts, and the divestiture of a number of ‘amphitheaters’ (US Spelling meaning outdoor stadiums).
For independent operators who had spent years watching the market consolidate with little regulatory response, any binding obligations on Live Nation felt like progress. The fear of a clean win for the company was real, and a negotiated outcome seemed preferable to that alternative.
But as antitrust scholars and state attorneys-general have since made clear, the relief may be premature.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a visiting professor of antitrust law at Harvard Law School, has described the settlement in stark terms. Rather than addressing the structural problem of Live Nation’s dominance across concert promotion, venue ownership, and ticketing, the deal amounts to a patch over the symptoms. A 15 percent cap on Ticketmaster service fees sounds meaningful in isolation, but it applies only to Live Nation-owned stadiums, which represent a small fraction of Ticketmaster’s overall business. And because the company remains vertically integrated across multiple layers of the live entertainment supply chain, it retains the ability to recoup any reduced income in one area by raising prices or tightening terms in another.
The ALMBC has consistently raised concerns about exactly this kind of market structure. As we noted when the trial commenced, the power that flows from controlling promotion, venues, and ticketing simultaneously is not merely theoretical. It plays out every day in the choices available to smaller operators, independent promoters, and venues with limited bargaining power. When a single entity can threaten to withhold high-profile tours from venues that do not sign exclusive ticketing agreements, or can cross-subsidise losses in one market segment by extracting more from another, the competitive environment for everyone else becomes structurally compromised.
The settlement has been rejected by 36 US states, including Massachusetts, which chose to continue pursuing the trial. Professor Allensworth notes that the trial judge retains the ability to order remedies that go beyond what the DOJ agreed to, potentially including the structural separation of Live Nation and Ticketmaster that the original lawsuit sought. That outcome, she argues, would have done far more to open the market to competing promoters and ticketing platforms than the current arrangement, which leaves the underlying power imbalance untouched.
For Australian independent operators, the lessons are clear. Vertical integration without adequate regulatory oversight does not simply disadvantage competitors. It reshapes the entire market around the needs of the dominant player, leaving smaller businesses to absorb the consequences.
Our members are primarily sole traders and small businesses. They are the venues, promoters, and operators who hold Australian live music culture together at the grassroots level. They cannot cross-subsidise. They cannot leverage control of one market to protect their position in another.
What is unfolding in the United States is not a distant legal drama. It is a test case for whether democratic governments can and will impose meaningful limits on the concentration of power in live entertainment. Australia faces its own version of these questions.
Live Nation’s presence here spans promotion, ticketing, and major venue relationships. The same structural risks that US prosecutors argued warranted a company breakup exist in the Australian context, even if the scale differs. Our competition regulators and policymakers need to be asking the hard questions now, before the market reaches a point where meaningful intervention becomes as contested and complicated as it has in the US.
The experience of Aotearoa New Zealand illustrates how quickly this consolidation can take hold in smaller, geographically isolated markets. Research published by Massey University researchers found that over the past seven years New Zealand’s live music market has become increasingly concentrated under vertically integrated multinationals, with Live Nation holding ticketing arrangements across council-owned venues in Auckland, Wellington, Rotorua, Christchurch and Dunedin, as well as ownership stakes in festivals and regional event organisers. As NZ pop-culture site The Spinoff has noted, a large proportion of the income generated from major events in Aotearoa now flows offshore, leaving grassroots venues, independent promoters and local artists to absorb the structural consequences of a market shaped primarily around the needs of global operators.
None of this is a reflection on the many talented and dedicated people who work for Live Nation in Australia, who are well regarded across the industry and who contribute genuinely to the live music ecosystem here. The ALMBC’s concerns are structural, not personal.
The ALMBC will continue to monitor the ongoing proceedings in the United States and urges Australian policymakers, competition regulators, and industry stakeholders to engage seriously with what this case reveals. A cautious sigh of relief is understandable.
But for Australia’s independent live music sector, the work of building a genuinely fair and competitive market is far from finished. The trial continues. So does our advocacy.
