Live Nation DOJ Trial, Lil Durk Delay & More Top Music Law News

THE BIG STORY: Even when she’s not directly involved, Taylor Swift is at the center of everything.

That includes the DOJ’s blockbuster antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which went to trial this week in a Manhattan federal courtroom. I was at the courthouse as the feds told jurors that Live Nation is a “monopolist” that has “broken” the live music industry — and as the company fired back that the DOJ has little hard evidence to prove such a claim in a concert biz that’s “more competitive than ever.”

Taylor was a key point of discussion – thanks to Ticketmaster’s infamous 2022 presale for her Eras Tour, which saw major service delays and website crashes. Though that debacle took place months after the DOJ launched its monopoly investigation into Live Nation, the messy Eras rollout sparked widespread backlash against the company that arguably gave the feds more political capital to file their sweeping lawsuit 18 months later.

So it’s no surprise that the DOJ quickly told jurors that the presale failure was emblematic of a company that had little competitive incentive to make sure that its customer service was reliable: “Their technology is held together by duct tape.”

For Live Nation’s response and a full breakdown of the opening day of the trial, go read our entire story. If you need a quick catch-up, you can go read our explainer. And stick with Billboard for updates as the trial moves ahead toward a momentous verdict next month.

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Other top stories this week…

-Lil Durk’s trial on federal murder-for-hire charges was postponed again, this time from April to August, despite the rapper’s continued objections to the delays.

-Brian Steel won accolades after he freed Young Thug; then, months later, he signed up to defend Sean “Diddy” Combs. In an extensive interview, Steel told me about those cases, the long career that preceded them, and why he doesn’t see them as all that different.

-Justin Timberlake filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent a Hamptons police department from releasing officer bodycam footage from his well-publicized DWI arrest two years ago.

-Court documents confirmed that the singer D4vd is the official target of an active grand jury probing the death of Celeste Rivas, a 14-year-old girl whose body was discovered in his car this past fall.

-A month after Ye issued a public apology blaming his antisemitism on brain damage, his lawyers argued in court documents that such behavior was instead an “intentionally provocative” form of protected artistic expression.

-Salt-N-Pepa hired veteran music litigator Richard Busch for their upcoming appeal aimed at taking back their masters from UMG via copyright termination. Busch is known for winning the landmark copyright case over “Blurred Lines” and Marvin Gaye‘s “Got to Give It Up.”

-The Salt-N-Pepa case is a warning to artists that “the promise of termination rights is in no way guaranteed,” says a new Billboard op-ed from Loren Wells and Tim Kappel – the two lawyers who won the recent high-profile Vetter ruling on global copyrights.

-Michael Jackson’s estate is facing a new child sex trafficking lawsuit from the Cascio family, a group of five siblings who have previously claimed that they were abused by the singer in the 1990s.

-The California Supreme Court rejected Tory Lanez’s bid to overturn his convictions for shooting Megan Thee Stallion, effectively affirming his 10-year prison sentence.

-An appeals court overturned BMI’s price hike on concert promoters, ruling that a 138% rate increase was “unreasonable” and that a new approach had “no precedent in the history of the industry.”

-A Texas man was sentenced to 15 years in prison for causing a head-on car crash that killed Dixie Chicks founding member Laura Lynch in December 2023.

-A judge declined to throw out Chris Brown’s defamation claims against a woman who claimed in a 2024 documentary that Brown raped her on a yacht owned by Sean “Diddy” Combs.

-Will Smith’s lawyers didn’t mince words in asking a judge to dismiss a “farce of a lawsuit” brought by a tour musician who says he was fired after complaining of sexual harassment: “Nothing but an attempted money grab.”

-Lit, known for the 1999 smash “My Own Worst Enemy,” filed a lawsuit to enforce a 50% streaming clause in the band’s RCA Records deal – a notable provision for a time when streaming was largely non-existent.

-Cher’s son Elijah Blue Allman was arrested for acting belligerently at an elite private high school in New Hampshire. He has no apparent connection to the school, and it remains unclear why he was there.