US companies Ticketmaster and Live Nation agreed a merger, which was completed in the US in February. The UK businesses, which sell tickets and promote events respectively, had their deal referred to the Competition Commission by consumer regulator the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).
The Commission cleared the deal last December but that verdict was objected to by Eventim, a German ticketing firm that had entered into a deal with Live Nation.
It appealed the verdict and the CAT said that it had the right for its arguments to be heard. The case was sent back to the Competition Commission, which has ruled again in favour of the merger.
Eventim had made a deal with Live Nation before its merger with Ticketmaster under which the promoter would use Eventim's ticketing software and services, and would be allocated a portion of Live Nation's tickets for its shows.
The Competition Commission, though, has found that the merger will not much affect that deal. It said that Live Nation was still contractually bound to provide Eventim with tickets, and that it had committed to do so.
It said that while the deal would affect the amount of co-operation between the companies over and above their agreement, this should not hinder Eventim's expansion into the UK market. That expansion was its own responsibility, not Live Nation's, it said.
"The merger will make little difference to the prospects of Eventim’s success in the UK," said a Competition Commission statement. "On the basis of its agreement with Live Nation alone, Eventim will be a small-scale retailer of live music tickets in the UK and its prospects of becoming a large-scale retailer and competing effectively with the large incumbent ticket retailers will not be affected significantly by the merger."
"We found that, in order to increase materially the extent of competition in the market, Eventim would have needed to become a large-scale retailer of live music tickets," said the Competition Commission's final report. "However, we found that there were significant barriers to doing so, and none of the other small-scale retailers in the UK had been able to overcome them."
"We noted that Eventim was a distinctive new entrant but we found that the extent of Eventim’s success in becoming a large-scale retailer of live music tickets and overcoming these barriers would have depended primarily on its own efforts and abilities."
"We concluded that the merger was unlikely to result in a substantial lessening of competition in the UK market for the primary retailing of live music tickets as a result of its effects on Eventim," it said.
Competition Commission deputy chairman Christopher Clarke said that it had looked at new evidence, but that none of that changed its conclusion.
"After taking into account further submissions from the parties and reconsidering the evidence, we have reconfirmed our original decision that the merger will not have a significant effect on the success or otherwise of Eventim in entering and expanding in the UK ticketing market," he said
"We have taken into account that there have been a number of disputes over the terms and operation of the agreement between Live Nation and Eventim, but we found that these disputes did not undermine materially our analysis of the impact of the merger," he said.
