Did Live Nation punish a venue by taking Billie Eilish away?

John Abbamondi had orders to let the Ticketmaster CEO go easy.

In April 2021, Abbamondi was the CEO of BSE Global, which ran the Brooklyn-area Barclays Center. BSE Global’s existing Ticketmaster contract expires at the end of September, and Abbamondi and his team evaluated offers from SeatGeek, AXS and Ticketmaster. The economics of the Ticketmaster offer, according to Abbamondi, “were not as good as the other two.” In addition to better financial terms, including an equity stake in the company, SeatGeek’s technology was “superior” to Ticketmaster on balance, the region decided. This led to their decision to go with a new, younger player in the field.

When Abbamondi called Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapinoe to break the news, the meeting turned tense — and a recording of it came back to haunt Rapinoe in this month’s Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly trial. Abbamondi was one of two witnesses who took the stand Wednesday, along with Mitch Helgerson, chief revenue officer of the Minnesota Wild hockey team. Both men said that when they considered switching their venues’ ticketing platform from Ticketmaster, executives there threatened them with the loss of important Live Nation-promoted concerts. The Justice Department and 40 state and district attorneys general say this is the behavior of a monopolist – a charge Live Nation-Ticketmaster denies.

“The nervous guy was me and the angry guy was Michael,” Abbamondi told a Manhattan jury on Wednesday, identifying the voices in the 2021 call. The few minutes played in court depict an exchange that went “sideways,” as Abbamondi said, as he tried to thread a delicate needle: rejecting Ticketmaster’s services while trying to hold its parent company Live Nation to a separate contract while promising to fill Barclays Center with concerts. At one point, Rapinoe dropped an F-bomb while discussing her frustration over a contract dispute. He told Abbamondi that he believed they were never planning to renew with Ticketmaster.

Rapinoe reminded Abbamondi about the new UBS Arena in Queens, which could attract more Live Nation-promoted shows away from Barclays. Although Ticketmaster theoretically operates separately from Live Nation, Abbamondi took this as a “not-so-veiled” threat – the left hand would be cut off, and the right hand would come back. Abbamondi hung up the phone, feeling that he had “failed to do his job there, which was to land the plane smoothly.”

Abbamondi still signed the deal with SeatGeek, which begins in October 2021. Then, he testified, the venue “saw a dramatic decline in Live Nation shows booked into the arena.” Artists began filling stadiums again after the start of the Covid pandemic, including Billie Eilish, who had to cancel shows at New York venues including Barclays in 2020. Generally, Abbamondi hoped that Live Nation would book her show again the next time she was on tour. But when they started touring again in 2021, they booked at the new venue Rapinoe warned about — UBS Arena. When Barclays asked about it, he was told it was “the artist’s decision”. Other promoters have not reduced their bookings at Barclays to such an extent, he said.

In 2022, just a few months into the SeatGeek contract, Abbamondi was fired. Less than a year later, Barclays announced it was moving back to Ticketmaster.

According to witnesses, Ticketmaster was not the best choice for a ticket seller, but Live Nation’s strength as a concert promoter forced them to do so. In the case of the Minnesota Wild, who played at the then-Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Helgerson said the fear of losing Live Nation shows was a big reason behind the decision to remain with Ticketmaster – even though he found he would make $1 million more per year by switching to SeatGeek.

The arena was already in stiff competition for concerts with the Target Center, a similar-sized venue across the river in Minneapolis. So when the Wild began negotiations on renewing their contract with Ticketmaster in 2018, the ticketing service knew how to hit them where they would suffer. When Wilde staff mentioned they also planned to consider an offer from SeatGeek, a Ticketmaster executive told them that Live Nation could move all of its shows to the Target Center if they changed ticketing vendors, Helgerson testified. “We took it as a credible threat,” he said. “Losing those shows would be almost devastating to our organization.”

To mitigate the risk, SeatGeek offered “Live Nation Retaliation Insurance” – a promise to compensate the arena for concerts booked at the Target Center on dates open by Excel. SeatGeek offered the arena a larger upfront bonus and fee share, giving the venue an additional $1 million per year in total compared to Ticketmaster’s offer. But even retaliation insurance could not compensate for the loss of “venue liveliness” and the impact Live Nation having to cancel its shows had on its own staff. Ticketmaster’s alleged threat posed an “insurmountable challenge”. The venue signed another contract with Ticketmaster.

There were complicating factors in both cases, which Live Nation pointed out during cross-examination. Moving to a new ticketing platform was both risky and a lot of effort. Like any enterprise software switch, it will take a while for employees to get up to speed, and Abbamondi acknowledged that SeatGeek’s technology gave them more options on things like how to price individual seats, but it was less user-friendly. An executive with whom Helgerson worked was concerned that SeatGeek’s lack of interface for concert promoters at the time would hinder them from bringing shows to the arena. Abbamondi also said he is personal friends with the SeatGeek co-founder, and testified that he was not fired because of the SeatGeek deal – he was told two other reasons.

There was also a separate legal dispute between Barclays Center and Ticketmaster, which appeared to be at least part of the reason why the call between Abbamondi and Rapinoe was broken. Barclays believed that their contract with Ticketmaster would expire at the end of September 2021, as originally stated. But Ticketmaster believed that because the COVID pandemic shortened the regular NBA season, a clause in the contract was triggered to extend that contract for another year. Furthermore, in an earlier, unrecorded call between Abbamondi and Rapinoe, the Ticketmaster CEO suggested that they should be given a chance to counter any offer received by Barclays. Abbamondi said she tried her best to respond in a “non-committal” manner, but the implication was that Rapinoe might have seen it differently.

The jury must decide whether the threats described by Abbamondi and Helgerson were actually as dangerous as they believed, one of several factors that will determine whether Live Nation-Ticketmaster should face penalties – including the possibility of a breakup.

In a text exchange, Abbamondi’s friend, Live Nation executive Patty Kim, wrote that he should “think about the bigger relationship” with Live Nation, not just who is writing the bigger check. He added a funny face. “That’s my friend saying, ‘You know what I mean,'” Abbamondi said. This week, the jury is expected to get a chance to hear from the rival who reportedly offered those big checks: SeatGeek CEO Jack Grotzinger.