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Good morning - Michael here, writing from the frontlines of Massif & Kroo: Here's what you need to pay attention to in media today:

That's the number of states — plus D.C. — that refused to join the federal settlement with Live Nation and are still pursuing broader remedies in court. Some are going after triple damages. And that number tells you more about what's actually happening in live entertainment than anything in the settlement itself.

The Live Nation story this week is not really an antitrust story. It is a distribution-control story wearing legal language. And if you are building anything that touches live events, creator tours, ticketed experiences, or fan access, the business implications are bigger than the headlines suggest.

Here's what the settlement actually does.

ICYMI: The DOJ filed suit in 2024, accusing Live Nation and Ticketmaster of monopolizing concert promotion, venue operations, artist management, and ticketing to shut out competitors. After less than a week of trial, they settled. No breakup. No admission of wrongdoing. Live Nation keeps Ticketmaster. It divests exclusive booking agreements at 13 amphitheaters, caps service fees at 15%, and opens portions of the Ticketmaster platform to competitors like SeatGeek and StubHub.

Exclusivity contracts get capped at four years, and venues can now allocate tickets to competing platforms even during an active Ticketmaster deal. A former senior DOJ antitrust official told NBC News: "You really couldn't send a clearer message that antitrust is dead at the federal level than settling this particular case."

Now here's what the coverage is missing. While it opens a window for some venues to distribute tickets through competing primary marketplaces, and creates a $280 million fund for state damages claims, on paper, that sounds like a resolution, but it is not.

Thirty-two states and D.C. are continuing to try the case, and the remedies they are seeking go further — broader structural changes, and in some cases, triple damages. That means the federal settlement does not close this chapter. It opens a second, messier one where the real leverage questions get litigated state by state. The reason this matters to anyone in media or creator business is that the case was never really about service fees. It was about who owns the infrastructure layer between an audience and a live experience.

Live Nation controls the venues, the booking, the ticketing, and in many cases the promotion. That is a vertical stack. And vertical stacks in distribution do the same thing in live entertainment that they do in streaming, in social platforms, and in ad markets: they set the terms for everyone else.

What changed is not that Live Nation lost power. What changed is that the structure of that power is now visible, contested, and partially destabilized — without being resolved. That is the worst position for an incumbent: enough scrutiny to invite competition, not enough reform to eliminate the advantage.

The ability to sell tickets, book venues, set prices, and own the fan relationship at the door is the live-event equivalent of owning your distribution. Right now, most of that runs through one stack. The settlement cracks the door open, but the door is not open yet.

Now — is any of this enough? The independent venue community says no, and they're probably right. The NIVA called it "a failure of the justice system" and pointed out that the settlement includes no specific protections for fans, artists, or independent venues. The $280 million is a rounding error for a company generating $25 billion in annual revenue.

For event-led SMBs, the signal is the same. Distribution bottlenecks do not disappear because the internet exists. They migrate to new infrastructure layers. Ticketing is one. Venue access is another. Fan data capture is a third. Whoever controls those layers controls the margin — and the margin in live has been quietly concentrating for years.

But here's what I think the smart operators are going to do with this moment. The live events market just got a tiny bit more open at the exact time that creator-led live experiences are becoming one of the most durable revenue streams in media. KSI just bought a football club and turned it into a docuseries. The Sidemen sell out Wembley. Podcast live tours are selling $75-150 tickets and filling 2,000 seat theaters.

Creator meetups are becoming ticketed events with sponsors. The demand for creator-led live experiences is real and growing — and until last week, the infrastructure to produce them was almost entirely controlled by one company. The actionable read is this: if your business depends on live access, audience capture, or event-driven revenue, you should be watching the state-level cases more closely than the federal settlement.

The federal deal sets a floor. The state cases will determine the ceiling. And the difference between those two outcomes will define how much room independent operators, creators, and promoters actually have in live entertainment over the next five years. The deeper signal is structural. Live events are becoming one of the last reliable places where audiences show up with intent, pay real money, and generate first-party data. That makes live infrastructure more valuable, not less.

This settlement doesn't fix the monopoly. But it gives independent operators slightly more room to build live event businesses without needing Live Nation's permission. And any time an infrastructure layer becomes more valuable, the fight over who controls it intensifies. That is what is happening here. The settlement is not the end of a story. The playbook from old Hollywood is instructive here.

When the Paramount consent decrees broke the studio monopoly on theaters in 1948, it didn't immediately create a competitive market. It took years. But the crack in the system is where the independents got in. Same logic applies now. The crack is small. It is the beginning of a repricing of who gets to participate in live — and on what terms. The operators who move first get the most room.

The YouTube story this week is not that the platform is big. The real story is that it has crossed the line from alternative distribution to the primary ad engine in media. MoffettNathanson estimates YouTube generated $40.4 billion in ad revenue in 2025 — more than the $37.8 billion combined from Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Nielsen data shows YouTube also led U.S. TV viewership in January with a 12.5% share.

That is not a digital win. That is a repricing of where ad budgets, audience attention, and strategic leverage now sit. For creators, this cements YouTube as the place where audience ownership converts into real media economics. For SMBs, the implication is direct: the most efficient ad buy in video may no longer be "digital video" in the old sense. It may be creator inventory on the platform that has already become television in everything but name. The money follows the attention. The attention is here.

Spotter used its March 4 showcase to pitch episodic creator programming as premium, TV-grade inventory. Audiences spent 52 billion minutes last year watching long-form creator shows across platforms. But the more important line is beneath that: brands are still buying this inventory from influencer and social budgets, not the larger television pools. The market is already consuming creator programming like TV while pricing it like social. That mispricing is the opportunity.

The next battle is not about attention — creators already won that. It is about budget reclassification. For creators, the upside is not just bigger sponsorships. It is a move into an entirely different revenue category. For SMBs, the lesson is that long-form creator media now carries the weight of premium brand storytelling. If you are still thinking of it as performance content, you are buying it at a discount that will not last.

YOUR NEXT MOVE: This week's stories share one thread: the infrastructure underneath media, entertainment, and creator business is being contested and repriced — in ticketing, in ad markets, in budget classification. The operators who understand where the leverage sits in each of those layers are the ones who will capture the margin.

Whether you are a creator building around live revenue, an SMB buying video inventory, or a media operator evaluating what your audience is actually worth — the question is the same: do you control the layer that matters, or does someone else? Audit that. The market is not going to wait for you to figure it out.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you on tomorrow.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media (owner of Massif & Kroo), aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]

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