The biggest act in the country wants to sell tickets for a major tour, and Ticketmaster is standing in the way. It’s June 1994, and Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament are in front of Congress, providing testimony for a House Government Operations subcommittee hearing regarding Ticketmaster’s potential monopoly in the concert industry.

A few months prior, in October 1993, Pearl Jam had released their second album, Vs., and subsequently set the record for most copies of an album sold in its first week. A few months after that, in April 1994, Kurt Cobain died by suicide. Whether they liked it or not, Pearl Jam were now leading whatever the future of the music industry was, and instead of capitalizing on this, extending their tour of arenas and amphitheaters into the summer, they submit a measured protest to a handful of politicians. Gossard and Ament, two of the band’s founding members, grin as they’re sworn in. They’re wearing shorts. Vs., indeed.

What led to this moment was simpler than one might think. Pearl Jam wanted to cap the service-fee charge for their shows at $1.80, and Ticketmaster refused. (Usual service fees in this era were between $4 and $8.) Catching wind of the disagreement, the Justice Department prompted Pearl Jam to submit an antitrust complaint; by this point, Ticketmaster controlled around 90 percent of the ticketing market in the country, based on certain accounts. There was, briefly, the sense that some real antitrust repercussions might come of this. But none did.

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anticompetitive nature of its domination. In an op-ed for Rolling Stone, Krista Brown, a policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, which is leading a campaign to break up Ticketmaster, called this just the latest in a long list of actions by a corporation gouging fans to maximize profits. She cited the company’s embrace of the previously taboo secondary market, the control of a baffling number of venues, and ballooning service fees as having led to “a near-extortion ring.”

“In the same way that people get frustrated with airlines—like, they don’t have a customer service line, because they are not afraid of losing people—Ticketmaster, it’s the same case,” Brown told me. “[They] don’t have to worry about keeping people happy.”

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That’s not to say Ticketmaster hasn’t limited the options available to (and potentially steered the ethics of) outside parties by virtue of its sheer control. When I brought up the idea of Ticketmaster serving as the punching bag for other complicit parties benefiting from their share of the pie, Krista Brown, the policy analyst, said, “That’s just such a classic Ticketmaster talking point, and I’ve heard it over and over again. … It’s like a race to the bottom. Live Nation created the ecosystem that exists, gave them these options, and all of them are terrible.”

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Brown, the policy analyst, is more optimistic in the prospect of a breakup. She believes that Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, is more motivated than his predecessors, and noted his recent success in blocking the publishing merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House. “[The Live Nation–Ticketmaster merger has] been kind of a dark mark on the way that the Obama administration handled antitrust concerns,” she said, “[such] that I do have faith that something will be different this time.”

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