MANHATTAN (CN) - A former executive at Brooklyn arena Barclays Center testified Wednesday at a federal antitrust trial that he received a "threat" from Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation when he floated signing with another ticketing brand in 2020. 

"On its face it was a threat to sue us," John Abbamondi, former CEO of the NBA's Brooklyn Nets and their arena, said of a letter he got from Live Nation's lawyers amid negotiations. "I viewed it as a bit of a Hail Mary ... They had no leg to stand on."

At the time, Abbamondi said he had been feuding with Live Nation over their ticketing agreement. When the Covid-19 pandemic canceled a chunk of the NBA season - and thus several Nets home games at Barclays - Live Nation claimed that triggered a clause in their contract with the arena that automatically extended their contract one year.

Abbamondi disagreed and started looking for a new deal, first receiving offers from ticketing competitors AXS and SeatGeek. When Live Nation's Ticketmaster made its subsequent pitch, Abbamondi said it was "nowhere near" as strong as the other two, and Barclays went with SeatGeek instead. 

In the months that followed, the arena executive claimed Live Nation went out of its way to "make problems" at Barclays.

"We saw a dramatic decline in shows booked at the arena," Abbamondi said. "We counted." 

By that point, it was 2021, and the live event world was still recovering from the pandemic that rattled the industry a year prior. Given the circumstances, Abbamondi expected some dropoff in major concerts booked at Barclays, but he said his arena faced a "much steeper" decline in Live Nation-promoted shows than other arenas in New York City did.

The cancellation of one concert, in particular, raised red flags: Pop superstar Billie Eilish was slated to make up for a scrapped Covid-era 2020 show at Barclays the following year, but went with the newly opened UBS Arena in Elmont, New York, instead of the original venue. 

Abbamondi reached out to Live Nation, which was promoting Eilish's show. The company said the arena change was an "artist's decision." 

But when his team reached out to Eilish's manager, Abbamondi got a different story.

"It wasn't our decision, it was Live Nation's," the manager said, according to Abbamondi.

Abbamondi said this was just one example of Live Nation, the world's largest live event promoter, punishing his arena for choosing a different ticketing service than Ticketmaster. 

After switching to SeatGeek, Abbamondi said he had trouble booking Live Nation shows at all. That had a substantial effect on the arena's bottom line, he said, since Barclays made a majority of its profits from concerts. 

And for the shows the arena did book after the switch, Abbamondi said Live Nation "rebuffed a lot of our efforts" to streamline the transition from one ticketer to the other. He recalled shows in which Live Nation refused to honor SeatGeek ticket barcodes, forcing concertgoers to manually exchange tickets between the platforms before showtime.

"Ticketmaster pulled up the drawbridge behind them," Abbamondi said. 

The Department of Justice, suing Live Nation and Ticketmaster for Sherman Act antitrust violations, claims that the companies are "monopolists" who use their dueling strangleholds over the live event promotion and ticketing industries as a one-two punch to keep artists and arenas from doing business with their competitors. 

Portions of Abbamondi's testimony Wednesday appeared to back that up, like when he harked back to a nearly decade-old conversation with Jared Smith, then the global chairman of Ticketmaster, who supposedly told him that "squeezing" the company on a ticketing deal would just result in Live Nation making up the difference by bumping up their concert rates.

"He made it very clear that those things were intertwined," Abbamondi said. 

On cross-examination, Live Nation's attorney David Marriott tried to get Abbamondi to admit that Ticketmaster wasn't a monopolist, but merely the superior ticketing option for its pedigree and technology. 

"They're on the short list of that, yes," Abbamondi conceded.

Marriott magnified Abbamondi's personal ties to SeatGeek as a company. He confirmed he received a job offer from the ticketer in 2015, and that he considers many higher-ups at the brand to be "friends and colleagues." He even attended the wedding of Russ D'Souza, SeatGeek's cofounder, who may testify later in the antitrust trial.

Of the claims that Ticketmaster retaliated against Barclays by canceling shows, Marriott reminded Abbamondi that Live Nation's own CEO Michael Rapino advised him that the 2021 opening of UBS Arena represented a new competitor in the live events marketplace.

"Mr. Rapino ... did mention that there were going to be challenges putting on concerts in our building," Abbamondi testified. 

The DOJ opened the trial on Tuesday by blasting the live event industry as "a broken marketplace" dominated by Live Nation and its ticketing subsidiary, Ticketmaster. According to the government, Live Nation has a more than 70% market share in large amphitheater promotions, while Ticketmaster's market share in ticketing is 86% - statistics that the companies' attorneys claim are cherry-picked.

The trial is expected to last about five weeks. The DOJ, joined in the action by 39 states and the District of Columbia, is seeking to break up the entities making up Live Nation and Ticketmaster's control of the concert industry.

Source: Courthouse News Service