Taylor Swift Promoter Says Live Nation Shut Him Out as AEG Calls for Ticketmaster Breakup

One of the country’s biggest concert companies and the veteran promoter behind Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour are urging a federal judge to reject the Justice Department’s proposed settlement with Live Nation and Ticketmaster, offering complementary warnings that the deal would leave the company’s power over ticketing, concert promotion and major amphitheaters largely intact.

AEG, Live Nation’s largest concert-promotion rival and the owner of Ticketmaster competitor AXS, argues in a 15-page Tunney Act submission that the proposed settlement would repeat behavioral remedies that have already failed to restrain Live Nation twice. In a separate filing submitted alongside AEG’s, Messina Touring Group founder Louis Messina goes further, alleging that Live Nation effectively shut him out of its amphitheaters in 2024 and prevented several major artists from using him as their preferred promoter.

“I am concerned that the music industry is broken,” Messina wrote in his submission. “If it is not fixed, I could go out of business just like other independent promoters who have fallen victim to Live Nation. The jury verdict in this case is a step in the right direction and will give the court an opportunity to try to reign in Live Nation’s conduct. But the consent decree is a step backward—it does not fix the industry and likely would make things worse.”

The two submissions are closely connected but not identical. Messina Touring Group operates in partnership with AEG Presents, but Messina says he runs the company independently and follows a different business model from larger promoters that compete for national tours with multimillion-dollar guarantees. AEG expressly incorporates Messina’s submission into its own comments on the settlement’s amphitheater and booking provisions.

AEG attacks the structure of the proposed ticketing remedy from the perspective of Live Nation’s largest corporate competitor. Messina describes what he says that market power looks like on the ground for an individual promoter trying to route major tours.

Messina is hardly a marginal player. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he has promoted artists including Taylor Swift, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, The Lumineers and Old Dominion. Messina Touring Group promoted Swift’s record-setting Eras Tour, whose chaotic Ticketmaster presale in November 2022 helped power the current wave of public and congressional scrutiny surrounding Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

The Justice Department’s antitrust investigation was already underway at the time, but the Swift onsale became perhaps the most visible example of concerns about Ticketmaster’s scale and helped lead directly to a January 2023 Senate Judiciary hearing examining competition in ticketing.

AEG Says Settlement Preserves Ticketmaster’s Lock on Venues

AEG’s central argument is that the proposed final judgment leaves intact the same economic structure that allowed Live Nation and Ticketmaster to maintain their dominance despite consent decrees imposed after their 2010 merger and strengthened again in 2020.

The company argues that venues still have a powerful incentive to remain with Ticketmaster because Live Nation controls concerts those buildings need.

“The threat need not be spoken to be effective,” AEG wrote, arguing that venues will continue choosing Ticketmaster because they cannot risk losing Live Nation shows.

AEG points to trial testimony involving venues that considered AXS or SeatGeek but allegedly feared losing Live Nation content, as well as evidence that competitors have tried unusual measures to overcome that fear. SeatGeek, for example, testified about offering venues “retaliation insurance” designed to compensate them if Live Nation concerts disappeared after switching ticketing providers. It also provided more information about this practice in its own Tunney Act submission last week, which similarly calls for the DOJ settlement to be rejected as insufficient to impact the entertainment giant’s stranglehold on the business.

The proposed settlement would loosen parts of Ticketmaster’s venue exclusivity and create an “open distribution” system allowing qualifying competitors to sell some primary tickets for venues still using Ticketmaster’s underlying technology.

AEG says that remedy is nowhere near enough.

By its calculation, Ticketmaster would retain control over roughly 6,500 of approximately 7,500 annual events at major concert venues, or about 85% of the market, while the settlement would theoretically open only around 170 additional events per year to competitors. Those figures are AEG’s estimates based on its interpretation of the proposed judgment.

More fundamentally, AEG argues that forcing rivals to connect to Ticketmaster’s back-end infrastructure does not create an independent competitor to Ticketmaster.

Instead, the company says it could turn Ticketmaster into the infrastructure on which its supposed competitors depend — allowing Ticketmaster to retain fees, charge for integrations, control access to the system and potentially gain visibility into commercially sensitive information.

AEG calls the potential result a “court-sanctioned platform dependency.”

That concern closely tracks arguments raised by SeatGeek and the Progressive Policy Institute in their own Tunney Act comments. TicketNews previously found that the settlement’s fine print would keep Ticketmaster at the center of inventory management, ticket authentication and other core functions even when a competing marketplace handles the consumer-facing sale.

AEG says the answer should be structural rather than another set of rules governing Live Nation’s conduct. At minimum, it is asking the court to separate Ticketmaster from Live Nation and prohibit Ticketmaster’s long-term exclusive agreements with major concert venues.

Messina Says Live Nation Stopped Returning His Calls

Messina’s filing puts names and tours behind the broader competition argument.

He says that for more than two decades he had been able to promote his artists through Live Nation-controlled amphitheaters, an important part of building summer tours for acts that may not yet be ready to fill arenas or stadiums.

That changed, he alleges, in 2024.

“I was trying to route several tours through Live Nation amphitheaters, but Live Nation stopped returning my calls,” Messina wrote.

Messina says Old Dominion was forced to route through other venues and that the resulting tour underperformed. He alleges Live Nation would allow The Lumineers to use its amphitheaters only if he was not involved, while Shawn Mendes’ agent had to negotiate with Live Nation directly because the company would not return Messina’s calls.

He also says he had been discussing promoting Mumford & Sons, but that the band ultimately had to use Live Nation to obtain access to Live Nation amphitheaters.

A conversation with Parker McCollum’s team, Messina says, distilled the problem into a single question: “What about the amphitheaters?”

“If Live Nation prohibits artists from using me to promote their amphitheater shows, I cannot compete,” he wrote.

Those are Messina’s allegations and have not been independently established by the court. But they closely resemble one of the central theories litigated in the government’s antitrust case: that control of desirable amphitheaters can be used to influence which promoter an artist chooses.

In April, the states that refused to join the federal settlement won a jury verdict finding Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable on the remaining antitrust claims, including claims involving primary ticketing and large amphitheaters. Those states are pursuing substantially stronger remedies.

Messina says Live Nation began returning his calls again in 2026 after the proposed consent decree was submitted, although he says he still does not know whether he will be able to obtain the dates and terms necessary to compete.

‘Monopoly Money’ and the Economics of Promotion

Messina also attacks what he considers the economic engine behind Live Nation’s promotion business.

He describes Ticketmaster’s ticketing profits as “monopoly money” that he argues allows Live Nation to offer artist guarantees other promoters cannot economically match, because Live Nation can earn money elsewhere in its vertically integrated business even when a particular tour performs poorly.

Messina argues that dynamic has helped drive independent promoters out of the market while allowing Live Nation to gain greater control over tours.

AEG makes a similar argument from the ticketing side: as long as Live Nation remains tied to Ticketmaster, it says the company retains both the incentive and the resources to use concert content to protect Ticketmaster’s position.

Messina says the settlement’s amphitheater provisions do little to solve that problem. He notes that Live Nation would relinquish certain rights involving 13 venues, but says those facilities accounted for fewer than 200 shows in 2025 and do not include many of the amphitheaters required to construct a viable national summer tour.

He also argues that provisions intended to give rival promoters access to Live Nation amphitheaters contain loopholes involving booking requests, venue holds and commercial terms that would be difficult for a court-appointed monitor to police.

The ultimate concern shared by the two filings is that the settlement tries once again to regulate how an integrated Live Nation and Ticketmaster behave without changing the incentives created by that integration.

AEG says that experiment has already been tried for 15 years.

Messina puts the consequences in considerably more personal terms.

“Most artists, agents, and managers are afraid of speaking out against Live Nation because they could lose everything if Live Nation turns against them,” he wrote. “Live Nation already has turned against me.”

In a statement provided to Music Business Worldwide, Live Nation EVP Dan Wall rejected the criticism from AEG and SeatGeek, saying the competitors’ filings advance their own commercial interests and misrepresent portions of the settlement. Live Nation said it remains confident that U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian will approve the proposed judgment.

That statement did not specifically address Messina’s allegations concerning Old Dominion, The Lumineers, Shawn Mendes or Mumford & Sons.

The Tunney Act comment period closed Sept. 4. DOJ must consider the public comments and respond before Subramanian determines whether the proposed settlement is in the public interest.

AEG’s Tunney Act Submission

Louis Messina Tunney Act Submission