Live Nation wins summary judgment in two of 22 rock concert monopoly class actions

U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson has granted Live Nation Entertainment’s motion for summary judgment in the Los Angeles and Denver cases of the set of class action lawsuits it faces. The original lawsuit had been broken up into 22 cases in 2006, as Live Nation had contended that the relevant geographic market was not national.

The class actions allege that Live Nation monopolized the market for rock concert tickets. Judge Wilson found that the plaintiffs’ lead expert Owen Phillips offered an inadmissible definition of the relevant product market. Phillips’ metholodgy was found to be unreliable, in that it could not be used to determine if a performer was a rock artist. The court’s decision states, “Dr. Phillips never meaningfully considered any narrower definition of the market, not did he ever ‘expand that definition until all reasonable substitutes [were] included’ as required under his own formulation of the SSNIP methodology.” Moreover, Phillips had not considered all the Brown Shoe factors.

Both sides now have three weeks to stipulate what the court should do with the remaining class actions.

Full content: Thomson Reuters News & Insight

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