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UK Competition Commission to reconsider LiveMaster
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 12 February 2010
The UK’s Competition Commission yesterday announced it would be reconsidering the proposed merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster after German ticketing giant CTS Eventim successfully appealed its original ruling on the deal.
As previously reported, despite initially raising concerns that a Live Nation Ticketmaster merger would give the combined company an unfair competitive advantage in the British ticketing market, the UK competition regulator subsequently gave the Live Master deal the go ahead just before Christmas, and ahead of the US regulator, who approved the deal last month.
The Commission’s original concerns about the merger were based on CTS Eventim’s arguments. Before the merger proposals were agreed, Live Nation was in the process of taking its ticketing in-house, having previously been a customer of Ticketmaster for years. Eventim were contracted to provide a range of services to Live Nation to enable some of the venue owner and tour promoter’s new in-house ticketing operation. As part of that deal Eventim would enter the UK ticketing market for the first time.
Live Nation argue that it will stand by its contracts with the German firm despite its merger with Ticketmaster, and says it is happy to commit to sell a certain portion of tickets for its tours and events through rival ticketing companies, in particular Eventim – and that is why the Competition Commission ultimately approved the merger late last year. But clearly Eventim still feel hard done by, presumably because although Live Nation will fulfil its contractual obligations to the German company, the rosey longterm and wide-ranging partnership between the live music giant and the ticketing outfit originally envisaged probably now won’t come to pass.
In their appeal, Eventim complained they hadn’t been given the opportunity to respond to the Competition Commission’s final decision to OK the deal, which came as a surprise to them given the regulator’s provisional report had been critical of the merger. The Competition Appeal Tribunal agreed such an opportunity should have been provided, and so that is now what will happen – ie rather than appeal the tribunal’s ruling, the Commission says it will now take Eventim’s feedback and then re-consider its decision. That process could take up to three months.
That means that the Commission’s approval of the LiveMaster deal is now provisional again, pending Eventim’s final submission to the regulator.
What this means for Live Nation and Ticketmaster, who have had to secure regulator approval for their merger in a number of territories around the world, isn’t clear. One assumes that having got the big one, US approval, LiveMaster – or Live Nation Entertainment to give it its proper name – will now come into being. If, ultimately, the UK Competition Commission don’t now approve the merger, I’d expect LiveMaster to just reluctantly sell off as much of its UK operations as required in order to overcome any remaining competition concerns.
