Shares of Live Nation fell 10.9% to $89.98 this week after The Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Justice plans to file a lawsuit against the company in the coming weeks. The Justice Department could seek various remedies, but, in recent years, there have been calls from both the public and private sectors to break up the company and separate the concert promotion business from the ticketing business.
In February, Sen Amy Klobucharwho helped organize the January 2023 Senate hearing in which Live Nation's president/CFO Joe Berchtold testified, called on lawmakers to “update and enforce antitrust laws” to prevent Live Nation and Ticketmaster from working concerts to “keep ticket prices high.”
“This merger should never have been allowed to happen,” Klobuchar said wrote to X on February. “Break them up,” Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in November 2022 after the Taylor Swift presale fiasco. Similarly, the American Economic Liberties Project and the American Antitrust Institute have called on the DOJ to break up the company.
Shares of Live Nation are down 15.1% in the four weeks since the week ended March 22, but remain up 34.3% year to date. The company will report first-quarter earnings on May 2.
The big declines seen among some of the most valuable music labels have sparked the Billboard Global Music Index to fall 4.5% this week — the biggest one-week loss since November 2022. That took the index down over the past two weeks to 7.5% after hitting an all-time high in the week ended April 5 .
Major stock indexes also suffered significant losses this week. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite fell 5.5% to 15,282.01 as video streaming giant Netflix and chipmaker Nvidia fell 9.1% and 10%, respectively, on Friday (April 19). The S&P 500 fell 3.0% to 4,967.23. In the UK, the FTSE 100 fell just 1.2% to 7,895.85. South Korea's KOSPI composite lost 3.4 percent to 2,591.86. China's Shanghai Composite was an outlier, rising 1.5% to 3,065.26.
Radio giant iHeartMedia was the biggest decliner of the week after falling 12.8% to $1.90. That brought the company's year-to-date loss to 28.8% and its 52-week decline to 54.3%. Music streaming leader Spotify suffered the biggest drop in terms of market cap loss, however, after falling 8.2% to $275.79, it added $4.9 billion in market value. Spotify will report first-quarter earnings on Tuesday (April 23).
Shares in Hipgnosis Songs Fund rose predictably this week after news that Concord had offered to buy the company for $1.4 billion, or $1.16 (£0.94) per share. The stock ended the week up 24.2% at 0.919 pounds ($1.14), just below Concord's offer price. The board encouraged shareholders to accept Concord's offer, which was a 32.2% premium to the previous day's closing price. That would provide immediate returns, the board explained, because the company needs “substantial financial and governance changes to improve its financial performance” that would suppress the share price in the meantime.
The other big gainers for the week came from South Korea. HYBE gained 8.2% to 230,500 won ($167.70) and SM Entertainment rose 4.0% to 78,100 won ($56.82). Year to date, HYBE is down 1.3% and SM Entertainment is down 15.2%.
