Business Discussion Question

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Business Discussion Question
The anti-trust is a study of competition with a body of law that assures the competitive markets with regards to the interaction of buyers and sellers in the vibrant processes of exchange. Promotion of such competition by the restrictions on cartel and monopolistic behavior vividly emerge as the first principle of anti-trust. The purpose of anti-trust laws is to promote and protect competition as a primary method that a country can use to allocate limited resources in maximizing the well-being of resources.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have violated the anti-trust laws by anti-competitive behavior, anti-trust violations, and intentional interference. Songkick claims that Ticketmaster and Live Nation combined effort in limiting its business as they enjoy their vast coverage in ticketing and live event industry (Meese, Alan, & Richman, 46). Ticketmaster controls about 70% of the sales on tickets as Live Nation has control on about 60% of the concert promotion. Besides that, Songkick claims that Ticketmaster outsize’s profits allowing Live Nation to make offers with loss to the potential customers hence freezing out Songkick competitors.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation were needed to make a submission to a consent decree by 2010 for securing the approval of a merger involved between the two companies. In the consent decree, it never covered the presale ticketing. The specification of the decree involved how Ticketmaster licensed its company’s platform to its competitors, for instance AEG.

In addition to that, Ticketmaster divested Paciolan with considering its allowances on venues to host personal ticketing services on their own website. These stipulations objectives were used to reduce the number of competitors to two. The justice department typified the decree as of using a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.
A better part of Songkicks anti-trust reclines on the fan club policy that was instituted by Ticketmaster (Aaron, 117). For a long time, an artist used to receive some tickets and decide on what he or she could do with them, for instance, giving out freely or selling them out. It is the duty of Songkick business model that was centered within such presale bundles that the company guides and helps in selling, promoting, and packaging to gain insight from clients.
The complainant had maintained that, before the merging of Crowdsurge and Songkick, Ticketmaster had told Songkick’s clients that they were only capable of selling their presale allotments to fun clubs and the club must stick to the setting of the criteria for an artist to receive their presale allotments to the funs club. Songkick and Crowdsurge abided by the rules since the complainant did not want to run afoul of Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s foremost market space. According to Crowdsurge and Songkick, the criteria around the fan clubs were intentionally impulsive to allow Ticketmaster to either threaten to withdraw or withdraw.
To sum up, the complaint mentions the director and CEO of Live Nation Mr. Rapino thirteen times to conclude that the executive repeatedly and personally engaged in the anticompetitive acts. The defendants are accused of threatening an artist by not marketing the artist’s tour. In addition to that, they add not to allow the artist to use paperless ticketing on the artist’s tour to increase chances of scalping if he or she (name not disclosed) chose to engage Songkick instead of Ticketmaster. This is a fraudulent method that is in competition to weaken the other less powered side of the competition.

Works Cited
Meese, Alan J., and Barak D. Richman. “A Careful Examination Of The Live Nation-Ticketmaster Merger.” SSRN Electronic Journal (2009)
Silvenis, Aaron. “Live Aid? Assessing The Ability Of The Ticketmaster-Live Nation Consent Decree To Restore Competition Levels In The Primary Ticketing Market.” SSRN Electronic Journal(2011):