Christine Varney, the assistant attorney general who ran the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division, is stepping down from her post. Varney ran the division during the federal review of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger, and according to the Wall Street Journal, she is resigning in August to join the prestigious New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. During Varney's tenure at the top of the antitrust division, the DOJ took an aggressive approach to investigating mergers, and in the case of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation deal, the DOJ required several concessions from the two before the department would approve the agreement.

StubHub President Chris Tsakalakis is continuing his media push to tell fans of the problems he sees with restrictive paperless tickets. In a lengthy blog post this week on the Huffington Post, Tsakalakis argues that the technology, primarily used by Ticketmaster, takes away choice as it pertains to tickets. Out of 1,000 concert fans recently polled by Wakefield, 95 percent believe they own the tickets they buy and should be allowed to do whatever they want with them. "Just as fans appreciate having choice for where they buy their event tickets, they also appreciate having choice in what they do with those tickets," Tsakalakis wrote.

Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard recently told CNBC that the company's new dynamic pricing initiative is essentially a "re-imagining" of the "concept of face value" concerning ticket prices, but that fans will not see much of a difference. Hubbard's comments came during a conversation with Darren Rovell where Hubbard explained that with fans already used to often paying a premium for tickets on the secondary market, he sees dynamic pricing as an efficient way to better price events correctly. He also said the system allows sports teams and bands to set ticket prices accordingly. "We think about it this way: Teams and bands know what is best for their fans. It is their business. They should be able to connect directly with their fans on the terms they see fit," he said.

Artists and promoters routinely withhold tickets and resell them through secondary ticket marketplace Web site StubHub.com, even though they do not disclose that fact to the public, according to StubHub communications head Glenn Lehrman. In an interview with Evolver.fm, Lehrman made clear that ticket resellers are not the main reason for high prices, instead stating that he does not believe the use of software bots — software that can surreptitiously scoop up large blocks of tickets — is nearly as pervasive among brokers as reported. Unfettered marketplaces like StubHub simply reveal what fans are willing, or not willing, to pay for tickets, and a lot of the blame for why prices are high can be laid at the feet of artists and promoters who only release a percentage of available tickets to the general public. "I can tell you for a fact that I know a number of artists and promoters list substantial amounts of tickets for their tours through StubHub, because that’s probably what they want to charge for a ticket, but can’t do so publicly," he said.