Here’s a fairly important thing that people don’t realize about a TM/LN merger:

Venues contract with the ticketing services and ticketmaster (and presumably live nation) give exclusivity rights to non-venue sales to a single agency creating their own monopolies anyway. TM has always been the only game in town for the vast majority of venues because they’re not going to split their sales off to 3-4 different ticketing agencies. Smaller venues don’t play that way and let other companies sell tickets to their generally GA-only shows, but any time a seat with a number has been involved, TM usually controls those venues because they KNOW they can own the secondary market on them.

Nobody should ever believe a single word Ticketmaster says about not giving preferential treatment to large-volume scalping operations. Those are the groups keeping TM afloat on slow-selling shows and they eat the losses when some shows just wouldn’t sell out at all. TM thinks they need them to survive.