totally agree. I think one other angle to potentially consider is that, like many other things in the industry, this has an outsized impact on smaller artists. singers make most of their money through touring so fans might be more inclined to wade through live nation's scheming in order to support artists with a smaller base.
Smaller artists don't make any money. There is no long tail. There's no working artist. For every 1 person you are thinking of, in the 10k to 300k monthly listeners range, there are 19 who are taking money they inherited or earned somewhere else, and transferring it to "music," and sometimes that transfer winds up as surplus to their fans, and sometimes that transfer goes to Spotify and LiveNation/Ticketmaster. You could abruptly stop going to shows of smaller artists, and nothing would economically change. It's a complete fantasy. I mean, it's an attractive narrative, it has some arithmetic to it, but c'mon, this is the status quo for all non-guilded creatives: the money that they earn is so little, it doesn't really matter. It matters from the point of view of the aesthetics of being A Consumer Who Supports Small Artists, but it doesn't matter economically in any sense.
Breaking up LiveNation/Ticketmaster would wreck the biggest artists, not little ones. Really we should be asking: What has Taylor Swift done for small artists? Whom has she featured on her tracks? Ed Sheeran, Bon Iver, Brendon Urie, Haim, Maren Morris... You might not have heard of Maren Morris, but she has millions of monthly listeners on Spotify.
The problem with what the Justice Department is proposing has similar energy to many of their efforts in the creative industries: they don't know what their fucking side is. They think it's "consumers." Man, if only it were so simple.
