Thread by @doctorow

It's obviously grotesque to pick a "worst thing" about the #Astroworld catastrophe that killed ten people (including a young child), but it's pretty easy to pick a "most enraging thing" about the disaster - how foreseeable and preventable it was. 1/

If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-… 2/

The kind of crowd-crush that killed and maimed those Astroworld attendees happens all the time. There was another stampede *at the Astrodome, two weeks previous*, at a Playboi Carti show.

news.yahoo.com/2-weeks-astrow… 3/

And *that* wasn't even the first time a Playboi Carti Astrodome show had a stampede - the same thing happened in 2019:

vulture.com/article/essay-… 4/

As @ddayen writes in @TheProspect, this happens at concerts all over the place, whenever you have the combination of general admission venues, a set of barriers that kettle attendees, and understaffed security. 5/

It happened in Central Park in 2018, at Snoop Dogg and Gwen Stefani gigs in 2016, and more.

prospect.org/power/the-astr… 6/

It would be weird if all these different venues all engaged in the same unsafe practices, but there's a common thread running through all of this: Live Nation, the monopolist whose conglomerate also includes Ticketmaster, Pandora and Siriusxm. 7/

Live Nation also has an equity stake in 300 major venues. If you're going to a gig, whatever happens is Live Nation's fault, because it runs the show.

As Dayen writes, monopolists don't have to care about adverse outcomes from corporate negligence. 8/

It's nearly impossible to enjoy live music without enriching Live Nation, so why should they give a shit if people who go to those shows get killed?

Live Nation understaffed the Astroworld show. It understaffs all its shows.

ticketnews.com/2021/11/housto… 9/

And, as is typical for Live Nation, the company had *no contingency plan for a crowd surge*:

wnmufm.org/2021-11-10/ast… 10/

(It *did* have a contingency plan for dead concertgoers, though: security staff were to refer to these corpses as "Smurfs" so as not to alarm other concertgoers). 11/

Live Nation knows that, as a monopolist, it's both too big to fail and too big to jail. The DoJ can whack it with $20,000,000 fines for corporate espionage and it just shrugs it off:

justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/t… 12/

It can illegally require bands to use Ticketmaster for their live-shows, get caught, only to be told "Don't do it again" by the FTC:

wsj.com/articles/justi…

It can do it again, and the only consequence is the FTC saying "Don't do it again," again.

justice.gov/opa/pr/justice… 13/

No wonder the company's stock-price hit a record high in the middle of a pandemic in which the global market for live events declined to a figure indistinguishable from zero:

finance.yahoo.com/quote/LYV 14/

Without antitrust enforcement, it doesn't matter how high Live Nation's kill-count climbs, they'll still be in business. 16/

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eof/