Just over 28 years ago, Taylor Swift was a precocious Montessori preschooler growing up on a Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm, and Eddie Vedder was the Most Important Musician in America, Kurt Cobain having bequeathed to him the (unwanted) title with his suicide that spring. Bill Clinton himself called Vedder to the White House to ask him for help with “messaging” around Cobain’s death, and the rock star in turn confided in the president that he was having trouble with a rapacious corporation named Ticketmaster, which appeared to be operating an illegal monopoly. A few weeks later, the Clinton Justice Department invited Vedder’s band Pearl Jam to be the star witness in an antitrust investigation inspired by the case. The band obliged.
But no sooner had they agreed to participate in the probe than their lives began to resemble a kind of pop culture Book of Job, replete with biblical floods, mysterious plagues, possible burglaries, and crippling self-doubt. And 11 days after canceling a Ticketmaster-free 1995 summer tour due to “pressures” they feared “would ultimately destroy the band,” Pearl Jam’s handlers at the Department of Justice issued an unusual two-sentence press release announcing the end of its investigation.
For years, the Ticketmaster saga, which cost Pearl Jam millions of dollars, would haunt the band. A 1996 Rolling Stone piece improbably cast the battle as a calculated effort on Vedder’s part to buy anti-consumerist cred. Admiring critics mused that “the band whined too long and loud about Ticketmaster” to maintain the “enormous momentum it built up from 1991 to 1994,” even as these critics whined about the increasingly unbearable cultural vacuity promulgated by the blitzkrieg consolidation that followed the DOJ’s abandonment.
Thousands of concert promoters, radio stations, record labels, talent agencies, and other music industry gatekeepers were swallowed by a small clique of deep-pocketed financiers in the years following the closure of the Pearl Jam case. As the speed of music file transfers onto ever-tinier devices threatened to depose the entire industry, moguls jockeyed bitterly over their slices of a shrinking, shape-shifting pie.
And yet the strange and awesome power of Ticketmaster, a company built around the novelty of a printer that could instantaneously produce a cardboard entry pass into thousands of concerts from the convenience of the nearest Sam Goody, grew as every other part of the business seemed to shrivel. Ticketmaster’s parent company is projected to gross $16 billion in 2022, more than the entire U.S. record industry grossed in 2021. Despite sponsoring almost no live events in the year following the outbreak of the pandemic, its stock price went up.