Because we hate them both, it is instinctual to hate the idea of a merger.  And indeed it is being looked at by the Justice Department.  There is a clear economic benefit of this merger:  eliminating double-marginalization. A monopoly causes an inefficiency because it sets price over marginal cost, resulting in too little output.  Live Nation is a monopoly but it sells its product through an intermediary, Ticketmaster, which is itself a monopoly.  That means that the “price” charged to Ticketmaster becomes Ticketmaster’s marginal cost, and Ticketmaster will fix an additional Monopoly markup over that.  This second source of inefficiency would be eliminated if Ticketmaster and Live Nation were to merge.

(This is somewhat over-simplified because they most likely use a more complicated contract than a price, but unless they use a very clever kind of contract, there will still be elements of double-marginalization.  And this very clever contract effectively creates a merger anyway.)

So when you read this post from Trent Reznor you should downplay his worries that the merger will result in an increase in ticket prices.  The auctions he imagines are already happening.  Nevertheless his other points are very interesting and worth a read.

And I would not worry that this vertical merger will shut out competition for ticket distribution.  First of all, Ticketmaster was doing fine at that already, and second, the only reason we cared about the Ticketmaster monopoly was the double marginalization.

The only argument I can see against the merger is that it throws up an barrier to competition with Live Nation for concert promotion.   You could certainly draw some graphs and show that this is a concern theoretically, but I don’t believe that the merger would be held up for this.