U.S. Senators Are Officially Weighing in on FTC v. Live Nation

Washington, D.C.’s Apex Building, which serves as the headquarters of the FTC. Photo Credit: Harrison Keely

U.S. Senators from both sides of the aisle are officially throwing their weight around in the FTC’s high-stakes BOTS Act lawsuit against Live Nation — a suit that’s now gaining greater steam alongside the DOJ’s concurrent litigation.

Those federal lawmakers – Senators Blackburn (R-TN), Blumenthal (D-CT), Cornyn (R-TX), Hawley (R-MO), Kennedy (R-LA), Luján (D-NM), and Moreno (R-OH) – formally moved to address the suit late last month.

And as we broke down then, the proposed amicus brief emphasized the petitioning lawmakers’ support for the BOTS Act – as well as their resulting interest in seeing the FTC beat Live Nation’s dismissal motion.

“Despite knowing that large-scale scalpers have easily circumvented these [purchase-limit] controls,” the Senators wrote, “Ticketmaster continues to sell their illicitly procured tickets on its resale platform—and reaps massive profits from doing so. … Ticketmaster has violated the BOTS Act by selling or offering to sell what it clearly knew or should have known to be ill-gotten tickets on its secondary-market platform.”

Closer to the present, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong just recently signed off on the lawmakers’ motion to file a brief, which “could be useful in determining how the BOTS Act applies to Ticketmaster’s platform.”

With that, the senators’ arguments and insights are now factoring into the legal battle, which received a dismissal hearing this morning. While a related update has yet to hit the docket, it’ll certainly be worth tracking the all-important case moving forward.

In the bigger picture, it’s hardly a secret that Live Nation is grappling with several complaints and a heavy dose of regulatory scrutiny across multiple countries.

Though there are a lot of pieces in play, the DOJ’s ongoing antitrust suit – which recently saw some of its claims dismissed but is still scheduled for a March trial – definitely stands out here.

Put differently, it wasn’t a shock when stateside litigation came up during Live Nation’s Q4 2025 earnings call this afternoon. (Spoiler alert: The promoter once again touted “record-setting” results, including 2025 revenue in excess of $25 billion.)

Regarding the Justice Department case’s partial dismissal, Live Nation CFO Joe Berchtold described the company as “very pleasantly surprised.”

“We were obviously very pleasantly surprised,” Berchtold relayed. “We never expected to get much of anything on that ruling. The first thing that they determined was that the promotion and booking services are not a monopoly – it’s not an accurate market definition. Which in our minds really takes away the breakup-of-the-company argument.

“Because the breakup-of-the-company argument was founded on some notion of mutually reinforcing monopolies. And they just found that the promotion and booking side isn’t [a monopoly],” he continued.

And as for the BOTS Act showdown, Berchtold reiterated Live Nation’s efforts to curb scalping and described a perceived broker shift to other secondary platforms.

“As it relates to allowing brokers to sell tickets on our platform,” Berchtold indicated, “we took some immediate action shortly after the FTC lawsuit [was filed] that dramatically restricts the brokers who have tickets from selling them on our platform. Limiting them to one broker account per tax ID and the number of tickets being sold needing to stay within the limits.

“So the impact of that has been to substantially reduce – roughly cut in half – the number of tickets that are being listed by brokers for concerts on our platform. Now, we think a lot of those are still being sold on the other platforms at this point, pending them taking similar steps,” he continued.

From there, the exec proceeded to rattle off Ticketmaster’s adjacent moves to stop scalpers securing tickets in the first place.