#livenation

[theonion]

[dimension20official]

Dropout & LiveNation present: Dimension 20 Live: Gauntlet at the Garden! A one-night only live event at Madison Square Garden in New York City happening on January 24th, 2025! Pre-sale tickets will be available starting Wednesday, April 10th (code: GAUNTLET), and general sale tickets on Friday, April 12th, at LiveNation.com. Featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan, Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson, Gauntlet at the Garden will be an event unlike anything you've ever seen! A video recording of the event will also be available on Dropout at a later date.

[twopoppies]

“In the past, LiveNation has claimed that artists set the prices, but behind the scenes, it’s clear that LiveNation execs find creative ways to squeeze the fans as much as possible.”

x

[mostlysignssomeportents]

All (antitrust) politics are local

The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.

The US government has abandoned antitrust. Today, companies facing antitrust jeopardy can just pay key Trumpland figures a million bucks, and they will make a discreet visit to the fifth floor of the DoJ building, have a little shufty around the Antitrust Division and the whole thing will just…go away:

https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/

Federally speaking, antitrust is now just another hustle. The fish rots from the head down, of course: Trump brings baseless lawsuits against media companies so that they can offer him a (colorably) legal bribe in the form of a "settlement":

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/03/institutional-failure-cbs-wimps-out-pays-trump-16-million-bribe-to-settle-baseless-lawsuit/

This opens space for "MAGA influencer lobbyists" whose boozy back-Broom deals with antitrust targets like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks swap legal immunity for personal "consulting" payments in the millions of dollars:

https://unherd.com/2025/07/the-antitrust-war-inside-maga/

But here's the thing: even though the fish rots from the head down, the world rises from the bottom up. The global wave of antitrust vigor (which swept up federal enforcers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the EU and China) did not start with government enforcers.

Rather, these enforcers were driven forward by an unstoppable current of popular fury over corporate power. That fury is ubiquitous, and it's growing. Federal enforcement was the channel that current was forced into, but merely damming up that channel does not cause the current to abate.

Right now, that rage is finding vent in municipal politics, which makes sense if you think about it, because corporate power is most vividly felt at the local level. When a billionaire rains flaming space-junk down on your home, or poisons your water with fracking, or jacks up your electricity and water bills by building a data-center, that's because a local politician has been captured by an oligarch. Very few of us are personally familiar with America's oligarch class, but a hell of a lot of us know where the mayor lives.

Writing in The American Prospect, Ron Knox documents the rising wave of successful local mobilizations against corporate power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-09-02-shifting-anti-monopoly-landscape/

In Portland, Maine, the community has risen up against the monopolist Live Nation/Ticketmaster's plan to build a 3,300 seat venue that would have destroyed the local music scene, which pulled off a miracle of mutual aid and survived the covid lockdowns and nursed itself back to health.

The Maine Music Alliance and its allies won their fight by packing town meetings, circulating petitions, and bollocking their municipal representatives – you know, all the stuff that has totally stopped working at the federal level, but which still moves the needle when it comes to local politics.

The Portland/Live Nation victory is a story of a couple thousand everyday people thoroughly trouncing a globe-spanning, rapacious, corporation that grossed seven billion dollars in the last quarter. Moreover, these everyday people beat Live Nation/Ticketmaster at the same moment as the feds were making noises about dropping their antitrust investigation against the company. Where the feds surrender, the people of Portland fight – and win.

It's just the latest installment in a series of similar victories, including well-known ones (Queens, NY blocking a giant corporate giveaway to build a new Amazon HQ), and quieter ones, like Tuscon rejecting an Amazon data-center. Localities are fighting the fire-engine cartel (three companies that control fire-engine production and screw cities on new vehicles and maintenance):

https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/legalradar/pm-59657794_complaint.pdf

For a guy who loves to throw his power around, Trump has a very primitive theory of power. He thinks that illegally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board will put a lid on the generationally unprecedented support for unions among American workers.

But the NLRB doesn't exist to make unions possible: unions made the NLRB possible. We have labor law because illegal unions fought so hard and terrified their bosses so much that the capital class had to sue for peace. Firing the referee doesn't end the game – it just means we don't have to play by the rules.

Trump has illegally torn up the contracts of a million unionized federal workers. It's "by far the largest single action of union busting in American history":

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-trump-celebrates-labor-day-as-most-anti-union-president/

And the Grinch stole Christmas. So what? The Grinch thought that the ribbons, tags, packages, boxes and bags made the Whos down in Whoville feel all Christmassy. But he had it backwards: the Whos had Christmas in their hearts, which is why they surrounded themselves with the tinsel, the trimmings and the trappings. He attacked the effect, but the cause was left intact.

We have a cause. The historic highs in popular support for unions are part of a massive wave of anti-corporate anger. We see it everywhere. It's in juries, which is why corporate lawfirms are panicking at the thought of their clients falling into ordinary peoples' hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire

And the reason we're so angry at the oligarchs is that they're so terrible. They've figured out that the only way to keep their billions is to crush democracy and replace it with fascism, which the tech PACs are doing right now, in an open scheme to end elections as means to change society:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-is-there-a-silicon

As Matt Stoller writes, "if the voting booth isn’t a meaningful way to fix problems, people will find other mechanisms to seek redress, using uglier tactics."

Which is why every fascist takeover was ultimately defeated by revolution, not elections:

https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop

But one place where democracy is still alive and well is at the local levels. Local races are weird and silly and bush-league, but they're also legible to people in a community that state and national elections are not. MAGA figured that out during the Biden years, packing library boards and town councils with insane chuds and culture warriors – but once decent people caught wind of it, we were able to trounce those weirdos in the next election.

I love municipal politics. My 2024 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause is all about local politics as a microcosm of – and a base for – global movements to address the climate emergency:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause/

For the past several months, I've been immersed in a seeming contradiction: global, local politics. That's because I have new all-time fave podcast, "No Gods No Mayors":

https://www.patreon.com/c/NoGodsNoMayors/posts

Every week, the NGNM crew profile a mayor – past, present or future, from all over the world and all through time – and prove, repeatedly, that "mayor" is the highest office to which a true oaf can aspire. NGNM has been an especially important balm for me in these brutal political times, because it scratches my burning need to think about politics, without making me think about the country's terrifying slide into fascism (it helps that Riley Quinn, November Kelly and Mattie Lubchansky, the podcast's hosts, are both infinitely charming and very, very funny).

As a confirmed NGNM stan (I've started sleeping with a mayoral sash under my pillow) I am duty-bound to consider municipal politics to be funny and, generally speaking, trivial. But municipalities are also cradles of democracy, and at now that cities are the front line of the fight against Trumpism – from antitrust to militarization of our streets – I feel like my NGNM-imparted encyclopedic mayoral knowledge has prepared me to join the battle.

Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act-locally/#local-hero

Image: Onbekend (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guillotine_Rijksmuseum_Gevangenpoort.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[thedailyelm]

WE’RE NOT DOOMED: Tue May 19, 2026

Some days are about the ways we’re fighting back, and some days are about the ways the people we elect fight back, and some days are about the power of one.

This has all three. Starting in New York…

New York

Wed, April 15 - 40 state Attorney General started a lawsuit against LiveNation and Ticketmaster back in May 2024. When the DOJ reached a settlement in March, 7 took the deal, the remaining 33 AGs (a bipartisan group) stayed in, and they won.

A jury agreed that LiveNation created an illegal monopoly when they bought Ticketmaster and now there are going to be consequences. Though those won’t be decided till a separate trial, that will probably go into 2027.

NY AG Letitia James lead the lawsuit. In a statement she said:

For far too long, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have taken advantage of fans and artists by raising prices for tickets and stifling any competition that threatened their power. A jury found what we have long known to be true: Live Nation and Ticketmaster are breaking the law and costing consumers millions of dollars in the process.

I love how, even though the DOJ made a deal, the 33 AG who stayed in won anyway. Trump can care about monopolies as little as he wants, and even help create new ones. But, the fact of the matter is, they are still illegal.

Fighting back is always the answer. Especially when the administration tells us not to anymore.

This will have a lasting impact. We don’t know how yet, and won’t for a bit, but something will have to change with how LiveNation and Ticketmaster operate.

This consumer and anti-monopoly win makes me feel less Doomed.

Toronto

Wed, April 15 - Thomas Reuters, yes, that Reuters, is a massive conglomerate that includes a whole host of companies other than just the newspaper. One of the things they are is a data broker, and oh yes, they are selling your data to the US federal government. AND they have a software called CLEAR, a public records and investigative platform that is DEFINITELY being misused by ICE.

So you will be very unshocked when I tell you that Billie Little, an employee, started asking questions about ICE using their products, and she was unceremoniously fired as a result. Now she’s suing, because, in Oregon, where she lives, you cannot be fired for being a whistleblower

And that would already make me feel less Doomed, but wait, there’s more.

Reuters shareholders are now demanding an independent Human Rights Impact Asessment into these contracts with ICE. And the proposal will get a vote in June. Naturally, TRI is hoping that their shareholders vote no.

The British Columbia General Employees Union is urging them to vote yes.

In a memo, they said:

This proposal about whether TRI has the due diligence infrastructure to identify, assess, and mitigate risks from specific, high-risk product applications, and whether investors have the information to evaluate that question. In our view, TRI’s disclosure has not kept pace with the changing risk environment it operates within, particularly when we consider the risks of data and software integration and interoperability.

I love that even though the company does not have anyone’s best interest at heart, except their own business interests, it seems like there’s a good chance that the shareholders do. And people like Billie Little definitely do.

As long as we keep seeing people fight back like this, I don’t feel Doomed.

Pennsylvania

Wed, April 15 - Governor Josh Shapiro signed three executive orders give dignity and support to the commonwealth’s disabled community.

The first is about data. And says that any data collected on the disabled community can only be used for healthcare and disability research and may not be shared with anyone outside of those specific areas.

The second creates a 30 volunteer commission called The Governor’s Advisory Commission on People with Disabilities. It will be focused on changing and improving disability policies for all types of disabilities at all levels of government.

And the last one reestablishes the Development Disabilities Council which has a narrower focus than the new commission of working directly with the governor on developmental disability related policies. To make sure those with developmental disabilities are given the dignity they deserve and able to be included.

Shapiro signed the orders saying:

Far too often, decisions have been made about people with disabilities, but not with them. These new executive orders that I signed today will not only improve services for Pennsylvanians with disabilities, they’ll also give this community a real seat at the table — helping my Administration bring about real change and deliver on policies that Pennsylvanians with disabilities actually need. Here, we treat people with respect and dignity, and we believe in listening to Pennsylvanians with disabilities and giving them a seat at the table as policy advisors.

As as disabled person, this is all very exciting to me. I sit in so many meetings where the disabled community just isn’t given a second thought, and it seems like Shapiro is trying to change that in PA. I’m not saying any of this will be perfect right off the bat, but god does that make me feel less Doomed.

-

I hope these stories help you feel more prepared to continue fighting back!

Remember, our voices are our superpower, but only when we use them!

[purlty23]

Ghost fans when nothing happens: omg what if terzo was aliveeeee haha

Ghost fans when Secondo has received new merch, is on the tour poster, has done an official puck drop, and was photographed in Detroit by an official venue with the help of Livenation staff two months ago:

[daisiesonafield-blog]

The touring business, ticket costs, artists’ revenue and the Ticketmaster + Livenation monopoly. Aka how touring works.

What this looks like per ticket:

So the band gets about 17.86% of each ticket sale.

Link

[lydiardbell]

Reddit on Nine Inch Nails ticket prices