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WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-8) today lauded the preliminary ruling of United Kingdom’s Competition Committee against the pending merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation and renewed his call to the U.S. Department of Justice to prevent the merger in the United States.
“The British authorities came to the conclusion that to let these two companies join together would quell competition in the primary ticket sales marketplace and lead to higher ticket prices for consumers,” said Pascrell, who introduced the Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing Act (BOSS ACT) in June in order to protect ticket-buying consumers. “Ticketmaster and Live Nation have much larger shares of the market on this side of the Atlantic. Therefore, the U.S. Department of Justice would have even more reason to prevent the merger of these two companies.
The UK Competition Commission came to its decision after considering the case of CTS Eventim, which is the second-largest ticket vendor behind Ticketmaster in the United Kingdom. In December 2007, CTS Eventim closed an agreement to sell tickets to Live Nation events. The commission determined that if the merger with Ticketmaster went through then Live Nation would seek to block CTS's development in Britain.
On July 27, Pascrell sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney bearing the signatures of 50 Members of Congress raising similar concerns regarding the effects of the merger on competition in the primary ticketing market and urging her to block the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
In the letter, Pascrell cited the fact that Live Nation began selling tickets in the primary market only three months before the pending merger was announced, suggesting the merger was an attempt to control the market by consolidating the two largest primary ticketing companies rather then allowing the competition to lower prices for consumers.
“From an antitrust perspective, the proposed merger is problematic in three ways. First, the merger would reduce horizontal competition by combining the two leading firms in the market for primary ticket sales. According to the May 30, 2009 rankings by TicketNews.com, the transacting parties, if merged, would be over five times more powerful than their next eight rivals combined. Additionally, some of these rivals are operated by Ticketmaster or rely on software provided a Ticketmaster subsidiary, Paciolan. Tellingly, the parties announced this merger less than three months after Live Nation entered the ticket sales market, suggesting they would prefer to combine rather than compete. This is the essence of anticompetitive behavior.”
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