In May 2024, the DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit to break up Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, hundreds of concert venues, artist management companies, and festival production. The DOJ alleged that Live Nation illegally maintained a monopoly over the live entertainment industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing agreements, retaliating against venues that used competitors, and acquiring potential rivals. The result: Ticketmaster controls approximately 80% of major venue ticketing in the US. Artists can't choose a different ticketing platform because Live Nation owns their venues. Venues can't choose competitors because of exclusive contracts. Fans have no alternative. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale (November 2022) crashed Ticketmaster's system, stranding millions of fans and exposing the fragility of a monopoly infrastructure. A system that can't handle demand because there's no competitor to absorb overflow.

Live Nation invested in Blink Identity, a company whose founding team "spent the last decade building and deploying large scale biometric identification systems in the Middle East for the Department of Defense." In September 2024, Live Nation announced face-scanning entry at concerts. Fight for the Future documented that the company's claims of "no current plans" contradicted Blink Identity's own announcement about using their tech at venues.

Letterboxd partnered with Playwire, a global AdTech company, achieving a 490% revenue increase through header bidding, direct deals, and DMP-based targeting. Playwire's proprietary Data Management Platform is integrated code-on-page across Letterboxd, collecting behavioral data that is packaged as "entertainment data from Letterboxd.com" and sold to advertisers across DSPs and social platforms.

In April 2026, the FTC ordered StubHub to refund $10 million to consumers for violating the Unfair or Deceptive Fees rule. The FTC found StubHub failed to display total ticket prices including all mandatory fees. StubHub had previously received a warning letter in May 2025 and did not respond to it.