ABSTRACT
On December 19, 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would end individual lawsuits of illegal file-sharers outside of cases of particularly egregious offenders (McBride and Smith 2008)—a distinct policy change for an organization that had spent over a decade litigating against those involved in illegal file sharing, often suing its consumers. On February 5, 2009, a New York Times blog reported that Bruce Springsteen was upset about the prospect of a merger between concert ticket-seller Ticketmaster Entertainment and Live Nation, a live events company, which “would place the dominant players in all sides of the live concert business under one corporate umbrella: the sale of tickets, the representation of artists and the control of concert halls.” Springsteen’s ire was raised when fans had trouble getting tickets to one of his shows from Ticketmaster and “were redirected to TicketsNow.com, a ticket resale site, where tickets were offered for considerably more than face value.” The blog post quotes Springsteen from his website as saying “the one thing that would make the current ticket situation even worse
for the fan than it is now would be Ticketmaster and Live Nation coming up with a single system, thereby returning us to a near monopoly situation in music ticketing” (New York Times DealBook Blog 2009).
