Did Live Nation punish the venue by turning away Billie Eilish?

John Abbamondi was on orders to let go of the Ticketmaster CEO easily.

In April 2021, Abamondi was the CEO of BSE Global, the company that operated Brooklyn Arena (Barclays Center). BSE Global’s current Ticketmaster contract will expire at the end of September, and Abbamondi and his team have evaluated proposals from SeatGeek, AXS and Ticketmaster. The economics of the Ticketmaster offer, according to Abamondi, “were not as good as the other two offers.” SeatGeek’s technology was “superior” to Ticketmaster’s in terms of balance, as well as better financial terms including an equity stake in the company, the arena decided. They decided to go with a newer, younger player on the field.

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

“The nervous guy was me and the angry guy was Michael,” Abamondi, who scheduled votes in a 2021 call before a Manhattan jury on Wednesday, said. The few minutes played in court depict an exchange that went “sideways,” as Abamondi put it, as he tried to thread the needle: rejecting Ticketmaster’s services while trying to hold its parent company Live Nation to a separate contract that promised to fill Barclays Center with concerts. At one point, Rapinoe dropped the F-bomb while discussing his frustration over a contractual dispute. He told Abamondi that he believes they never planned to renew with Ticketmaster in the first place.

Rapinoe reminded Abamondi of 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, Abamondi viewed this as a “not-so-veiled” threat — cut off his left arm, and his right arm will swing back. Abamondi ended the call feeling like he had failed “to do my job there, which was to land the plane smoothly.”

Abamondi still signed the deal with SeatGeek, which began in October 2021. After that, he testified, the venue “saw a significant decline in Live Nation shows being booked at the arena.” Artists were just starting to fill stadiums again after the start of the Covid pandemic, including Billie Eilish, who had to cancel shows at New York venues including the Barclays in 2020. Normally, Abamondi would have expected Live Nation to rebook her show there the next time she tours. But when she kicked off her tour again in 2021, she was booked at the new venue Rapinoe had been warned about — UBS Arena. When Barclays asked about this, they were told it was an “artist’s decision.” Other promoters have not reduced their bookings at Barclays nearly as much, he said.

In 2022, just months after signing SeatGeek, Abamondi was fired. Less than a year later, Barclays Announce It was back to Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster, according to witnesses, was not the best choice for a ticket seller, but Live Nation’s power 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 motivation behind its decision to stick with Ticketmaster — even though it found it would make $1 million a year more than switching to SeatGeek.

The arena was already engaged in intense competition for concerts with the Target Center across the river in Minneapolis, a similarly sized venue. So when the Wild began negotiations on renewing its contract with Ticketmaster in 2018, the ticket service knew how to get to what could hurt them. When Wild employees mentioned that they were planning to consider a proposal from SeatGeek as well, a Ticketmaster executive told them that Live Nation could move all of their shows to Target Center if they changed ticket sellers, Helgerson testified. “We viewed this as a real threat,” he added. “Losing those shows would be almost catastrophic for our organization.”

To mitigate the risk, SeatGeek offered what it called “Live Nation retaliation insurance” — a promise to reimburse the arena for concerts booked at Target Center on the dates Xcel was open. SeatGeek offered the arena a higher upfront bonus and share of the fee that would generally make the venue an additional $1 million per year compared to Ticketmaster’s offer. But even retaliation insurance can’t compensate for the loss of “venue” and the impact on its employees if Live Nation withdraws its shows. The alleged threat to Ticketmaster created an “insurmountable challenge.” The venue signed another contract with Ticketmaster.

There were complicating factors in both cases, which Live Nation pointed out in questioning. Moving to the new ticketing platform has been risky and a lot of work. Like switching any enterprise software, it will take time for employees to get up to speed, and Abamondi admitted that while SeatGeek’s technology gave them more options about things like how to price individual seats, it was less user-friendly. One executive Helgerson worked with expressed concern that SeatGeek’s lack of an interface to concert promoters at the time would be an obstacle to getting them to bring shows to the arena. Abbamondi also said he is a personal friend of the SeatGeek co-founder, and testified that he was not fired over the SeatGeek deal — he was given two other reasons.

There was also a separate legal dispute between Barclays Center and Ticketmaster, which appears to be at least part of the reason the call between Abbamondi and Rapinoe fell apart. Barclays believes its contract with Ticketmaster will expire at the end of September 2021, as originally stated. But Ticketmaster believes that since the Covid pandemic has shortened the NBA regular season, a clause in the contract has been triggered to extend that contract for another year. Furthermore, in a previous unrecorded call between Abbamondi and Rapinoe, the Ticketmaster CEO suggested that they should be given the opportunity to counter any offer Barclays receives. Abbamondi said he did his best to respond in a “noncommittal” way, but the implication is that Rapinoe may have seen it differently.

A jury will have to decide whether the threats described by Abamondi and Hilgerson were actually as threatening as they believed, which is one of several factors that will determine whether Live Nation-Ticketmaster should face sanctions — including the possibility of a breakup.

In one text exchange, Live Nation CEO Patty Kim, a friend of Abbamondi, wrote that he should “think about the larger relationship” with Live Nation, not just who is writing the bigger check. She added a winking face. “That was my friend saying, ‘You know what I mean,'” Abamondi said. This week, the jury is expected to have a chance to hear from the competitor allegedly offering those larger checks: SeatGeek CEO Jack Grotzinger.