Ticketing Tech, Venue Leverage, and What Jurors May Not Hear Ahead of Rapino Testimony Anchor Wednesday's Live Nation Trial Activity

The antitrust trial against Live Nation and Ticketmaster continued Wednesday with the remaining state plaintiffs pressing on two parallel tracks: first, that Live Nation’s control over content and venues continues to give it leverage over the rest of the ticketing ecosystem; and second, that Ticketmaster’s dominance is not simply the product of superior technology or unavoidable scale.

By the end of the day, those themes were colliding with another notable fight at the edges of the courtroom: what the jury should be allowed to hear as Michael Rapino prepares to take the stand.

With Rapino expected Thursday, Wednesday’s proceedings felt less like a transitional day than a table-setting exercise. The states used testimony from a former Ticketmaster engineer now working for an upstart platform to argue that there is nothing inevitable about Ticketmaster’s continued centrality. They then returned to the more familiar terrain of venue pressure and content leverage through testimony tied to Barclays Center and the H-E-B Center outside Austin.

At the same time, Live Nation’s defense continued to build a broader counter-narrative through a growing pile of exhibits aimed at showing that exclusivity, fee-sharing, premium products, and even platform shortcomings are not unique to Ticketmaster.

Live Updates from Wednesday:

[Before jury brought it]
Live Nation's Moskowitz: We do not want the jury to see Mr. Rapino's compensation. It's prejudicial.
States' Kessler: I am entitled to show how important this is to him, personally.
Moskowitz: The amount is not relevant to the bias.

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) March 18, 2026

A former Ticketmaster engineer gives the states a technology angle

One of the most interesting witnesses Wednesday was Edward Khoury of Jump Platform, a former Ticketmaster employee now working for a newer ticketing company that serves sports clients and says it supports open ticketing.

According to courtroom updates from Inner City Press, Khoury testified that Ticketmaster’s software was old, brittle, difficult to build on, and prone to capacity problems. He reportedly described it as hard to add features to and said parts of the system had to be restarted nightly to reload data. He also said Jump’s own system could work for concerts, not just sports, undercutting any suggestion that the market is functionally stuck with Ticketmaster because no one else can handle the complexity.

That testimony may not have had the emotional punch of the Slack messages aired earlier in the week, but it matters for a different reason. The states are not just trying to prove that Live Nation is powerful. They are also trying to rebut the idea that Ticketmaster remains dominant simply because it is the only platform technologically capable of doing the job.

Live Nation, for its part, used cross-examination to push back on that premise by emphasizing the scale of the biggest onsales and pointing out that Jump has not handled events on the level of Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. That line of defense is predictable, but it also reveals the stakes: if the jury accepts that competitors can credibly serve major live-event clients, it becomes harder for Live Nation to frame its dominance as the natural result of competence and scale rather than a product of integrated market power.

The states keep pressing the content-leverage story

The more consequential testimony for the core monopoly case appeared to come from Live Nation executive testimony tied to venue negotiations, especially around Barclays Center and the H-E-B Center.

According to the courtroom thread, the states highlighted language stating that Barclays “need[s] us a hell of a lot more than we need them” on the content side, and pointed to communications reflecting that Barclays could be reminded it would not get certain top tours. Another exchange tied to H-E-B Center referenced a strategy to “go silent, citing TM,” with testimony indicating agreement to that approach.

Those details fit squarely into the theory the states have been building for days now: that Live Nation’s value to venues is not merely that it sells tickets, but that it controls or influences access to the concert content those venues need in order to thrive. In that framework, ticketing decisions are not made on a clean slate. They are made in a market where Live Nation can allegedly use promotion and venue relationships to reward, pressure, or isolate counterparties.

That same theme surfaced earlier in the week in evidence about the “velvet hammer” approach to competitors and in internal language about using amphitheater leverage to shape surrounding-market business. Wednesday did not fundamentally change that storyline. It reinforced it.

The defense is building a broader industry-normalization case

FURTHER COVERAGE: USA vs. Live Nation Entertainment Trial

⁃ Live Nation Trial Presses Fees, Conditioning, and Consent-Decree Questions ⁃ Trial Resumes; States Press Amphitheater Case, Judge Presses Settlement Disclosure Obligations ⁃ Most States to Press On with Antitrust Trial, Resuming Monday in New York ⁃ Internal Chats Illustrate Holdback, Platinum Pricing Squeeze ⁃ Unsealed Exhibits Show Ticketing Executives Mocking Fans, Boasting of Upsell Charges ⁃ Judge presses states to negotiate after DOJ’s shock settlement— holdout AGs push for mistrial ⁃ Judge Says DOJ, Live Nation Showed “Absolute Disrespect” for Court in Settlement Chaos ⁃ DOJ-Live Nation Term Sheet Details Settlement Framework ⁃ Live Nation, DOJ Reach Settlement Avoiding Ticketmaster Breakup ⁃ Consumers, Policy Groups, and Lawmakers Slam Proposed Settlement ⁃ States Plan to Continue Pursuing Live Nation Antitrust Case Without DOJ ⁃ Live Nation Says DOJ Settlement Will “Improve the Concert Experience,” Denies Antitrust Allegations ⁃ ’I Will Not Be Gaslit’: Consumers React to DOJ-Live Nation Settlement

One of the clearest patterns emerging from the document flow is that Live Nation’s defense is trying to do more than just rebut isolated accusations witness by witness. It is also assembling a larger screen of contracts, term sheets, breach letters, and platform documents involving SeatGeek, AXS, and other ticketing arrangements to normalize many of the practices under attack.

That strategy came into sharper view in a series of defense exhibits involving Barclays and SeatGeek. In one set of letters and term-sheet revisions, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment complained of repeated SeatGeek failures involving Prime pricing, on-sale execution, queue management, playoff payments, reporting, and speculative ticket postings tied to Bruce Springsteen. Those documents show the Barclays-SeatGeek relationship deteriorating badly enough that BSE proposed stripping SeatGeek of exclusivity for Barclays concerts while preserving it for Nets and Liberty home games. Another letter stated that SeatGeek had failed to cure major breaches and warned termination could follow.

The defense point is not subtle. Live Nation appears to be trying to show jurors that rival ticketing relationships can also be exclusive, can also include premium and fee-sharing structures, and can also go badly for reasons that have nothing to do with coercion from Ticketmaster.

Some of those same exhibits also show why the strategy is more complicated than simple normalization. In one alternative-ticketing term sheet, a make-good and performance-incentive structure was explicitly tied to changes in Live Nation event flow, underscoring how central Live Nation-controlled or influenced content can be to the economics of a venue deal in the first place.

So even when the defense is trying to broaden the lens beyond Ticketmaster, the record keeps circling back to the same core issue: how much leverage sits with the company that can influence whether the shows come.

A side fight over what jurors may hear about Rapino’s pay

Another notable undercurrent Wednesday was the effort to keep jurors from hearing about Michael Rapino’s compensation as he prepares to testify.

That may sound like a sideshow, but it is not hard to see why it matters. This trial now contains a growing body of evidence about fan-paid fees, parking markups, premium products, platinum pricing, APF growth, and other strategies that extract more revenue from each event and each customer. Meanwhile, Rapino’s compensation has itself been a public flashpoint. Live Nation disclosed that Rapino received roughly $139 million in compensation for 2022, a figure that helped trigger a shareholder backlash the following year in which a majority of votes cast rejected the company’s executive-pay packages.

That does not make compensation evidence proof of antitrust liability. But it does help explain why the issue matters. Jurors are being asked to hear extensive evidence about the business practices that allegedly raised prices, concentrated power, and expanded monetization across the live-event chain. Whether they should also hear how enormously those practices benefited the chief executive is a fair and revealing fight.

The tension is especially sharp because Rapino is not a distant figure in this case. Internal records already aired in the trial have shown him discussing amphitheater strategy, venue access, and competitive threats. Thursday’s testimony is likely to put him even more squarely at the center of the story.

Wednesday’s testimony sets the stage for the trial’s biggest witness yet

Taken together, Wednesday’s proceedings served as a useful bridge into Rapino’s expected appearance.

Khoury gave the states a way to argue that Ticketmaster’s position is not technologically inevitable. The testimony tied to Barclays and H-E-B kept the pressure on the theory that Live Nation’s real advantage lies in its ability to link content, venues, and ticketing. And the defense’s continuing pile of contracts and comparative exhibits showed that it is preparing to argue not only that rivals do many of the same things, but that alternative providers often struggle on their own merits.

That leaves Thursday with unusually high stakes. By the time Rapino takes the stand, the jury will already have heard about platform limitations, venue pressure, speculative sales, premium pricing, fan fees, and the internal language of leverage. The question now is whether the executive who sits atop that system can persuade jurors that the company’s dominance is the result of competition rather than the careful use of power across every layer of the live-events business.

Evidence Documents from Wednesday

1246-6 / DX-0633
Barclays-related correspondence and supporting material laying out Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment’s complaints about SeatGeek’s platform performance, including Prime-pricing problems, on-sale issues, queue management concerns, and fallout tied to Bruce Springsteen ticket listings.

1246-7 / DX-0645
A revised Barclays-related term sheet and breach notice showing the deterioration of the Barclays-SeatGeek relationship, including an effort to remove SeatGeek’s exclusivity for Barclays concerts while preserving it for Nets and Liberty home games.

1246-8 / DX-0671
Follow-up Barclays correspondence asserting that major SeatGeek deficiencies had still not been cured, underscoring the defense argument that some venue-ticketing conflicts reflected platform failures as well as competitive pressure.

1246-30 / PX0276
An alternative-ticketing term sheet that explicitly ties financial make-good and incentive provisions to increases or decreases in Live Nation event flow, illustrating how central Live Nation-controlled content can be to venue economics even outside Ticketmaster deals.

1246-5 / DX-0625
Earlier Barclays correspondence warning that speculative Bruce Springsteen ticket listings and other SeatGeek-related issues were harming the venue’s reputation and potentially threatening future event bookings.