Ticketmaster Denies Report It Stifles Concert-Access Competition

(Bloomberg) -- Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. says it isn't stifling competition in the concert industry, pushing back against a report that the U.S. Department of Justice is probing whether its parent company is abiding by an antitrust agreement from eight years ago.

Justice Department officials are looking into possible cases where parent Live Nation Entertainment Inc. pressured venues in Atlanta, Las Vegas and other cities into using Ticketmaster to sell tickets to those shows or lose the venue business, the New York Times reported Sunday. The Times cited emails shown to it by Ticketmaster's main rival, AEG.

Live Nation bought Ticketmaster in 2010 and agreed to a set of rules, called a consent decree, to ensure it wouldn't gain a monopoly on live music promotion and ticketing.

"We take our obligations under the DOJ Consent Decree very seriously and we do not ever knowingly violate it," Jared Smith, president of Ticketmaster, said in a blog post on the company's website. The Times story says “that we ‘retaliate' when Ticketmaster is not selected as a venue's ticketing partner,” Smith wrote. “In short, they say we have stifled competition.”

“The reality is that none of these things are true,” Smith wrote. “It is absolutely against Live Nation and Ticketmaster policy to threaten venues that they won't get any Live Nation shows if they don't use Ticketmaster.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Leising in Los Angeles at mleising@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Kevin Miller, Bernard Kohn

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