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Live Nation’s direct business with genocidal Israel—through its complicit subsidiary Live Nation Israel—is the most vulnerable to our collective BDS pressure. The BDS theory of change prioritizes gradually yet persistently building sufficient people power to end links of complicity, one-by-one, based on strategic target selection criteria. This time-honored strategy is contributing significantly to isolating genocidal Israel, especially through targeted, lawful sanctions, as even Israeli PM Netanyahu (wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity) and US president Trump have recently admitted.
Though the second-degree complicit connections of its complicit investors further implicate Live Nation in Israel’s system of oppression, it is likely not possible for any company to unilaterally remove them. However, pressuring the company partly on the basis of these investors, as PACBI is calling for, sends a powerful message to private equity and venture capital firms that there is no place in the arts for those using culture to artwash their profiteering from genocide, apartheid, and oppression.
PACBI has called for pressure on Live Nation to drop its complicit Israeli subsidiary since June 2024. As with KKR-owned Superstruct (see below), any performance for or attendance of these private equity-owned corporations could be said to be contributing to oppression. We recognize and respect that some artists will choose to refuse appearances with any Live Nation or Superstruct event for this reason, and that fans may also justifiably boycott all such events.
That said, PACBI is not calling for a blanket boycott of all festivals, venues and events owned or operated by, or affiliated with, either company. We do not believe that this is currently a strategic or effective position for us to adopt, given the near-monopoly these companies have (and therefore the relatively fewer alternatives) as well as the urgent need to reach beyond our existing solidarity circles in order to ultimately compel policy changes in the mainstream. Rather, we are calling for pressure on the entire Live Nation and Superstruct networks, including targeted boycotts where strategic. Our main ethical duty is to urgently and strategically grow our movement to end Israeli genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism.
The level of complicity is an essential factor that the BDS movement, including PACBI, assesses in order to decide on which entity to focus our movement’s limited resources. This has relevance for our Live Nation campaign, since its associated venues and festivals have different levels of involvement with Live Nation, whether they are wholly owned, or operated, or for which Live Nation is the exclusive or primary programmer. Other important criteria that we use are whether we can achieve our goals in any particular campaign, and whether we can build an intersectional coalition to that end.
Last summer, grassroots BDS pressure effectively challenged the complicity of the world’s second largest music promoter, Superstruct Entertainment (founded by a former Live Nation executive), which owns over 80 festivals, mainly in Europe. Superstruct’s parent company is private equity firm KKR, which is invested in the Israeli tech sector, weapons manufacturing, climate destruction, and the displacement of Wet’suwet’en Indigenous land defenders in Canada. PACBI has called for strategic pressure, including targeted boycotts, against the entire Superstruct network, since March 2025. Two Superstruct events so far have met all our demands, Mighty Hoopla, the UK’s biggest queer music festival, and Boiler Room.
When Superstruct’s Sónar festival in Barcelona failed to meet the demands of Palestinian civil society and its own community, more than 60 of its artists dropped out—leading to Spain’s culture minister declaring that KKR is “not welcome in Spanish culture.” At least half the line up dropped out from another Superstruct festival, Field Day, after it failed to engage with the over 200 artists calling on it to meet Palestinians’ demands. PACBI had called for the boycott of both events. By the end of this year’s festival season, dozens of Superstruct’s festivals, across many different genres, had taken steps to cut their complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid by meeting some or all of our demands.
Campaigning for winnable demands is an essential element of our BDS strategy. Campaigning without such demands, on the other hand, and sloganeering without strategy, does little to contribute to building the sufficient people power we need to isolate and dismantle Israel’s entire regime of oppression. We reiterate our call for pressure, including targeted, strategic boycotts, on the entire Superstruct network, to compel all its events to meet and stick to the Palestinian demands, at a minimum.
The BDS movement has always understood ending complicity in genocidal Israel’s regime of oppression as a journey that we pressure states, corporations and institutions to undergo. Every tax-paying individual in the colonial West is–inadvertently or otherwise–complicit in their governments’ trade with Israel, including military trade, illegal occupation and apartheid trade and so on. The same goes for pension-holders whose pension funds are invested in Israeli weapons companies, banks, or complicit international corporations. This premise is precisely the basis on which we call on individuals to join our movement, and campaign for such funds–as well as states, corporations and institutions–to end complicity in genocide and apartheid.
The same analysis applies to arts organizations who are implicated in the complicity of their parent companies, including but not limited to Live Nation subsidiaries and Superstruct’s events. In order to effectively and strategically pressure them to cut their complicity, PACBI welcomes the steps they take to do so, while calling for further pressure if all of our demands have not yet been met. This was PACBI’s approach for the Superstruct-owned Barcelona festival Sónar, for instance, among hundreds of other cases over more than two decades. This approach provides an incentive for arts organizations to continue on the journey to meet our demands, by cutting down their complicity through the decisions they can actually make.
It should be noted that welcoming such steps does not constitute endorsement of the organization in question. Since 2004, PACBI has never endorsed any international organization that has been a target of pressure or boycotts. On the other hand, at least 1,500 international arts organizations have endorsed our call for the cultural boycott of Israel, become Apartheid Free Zones, and/or endorsed PACBI and the BDS movement. We wholeheartedly welcome these endorsements, while encouraging these organizations to ensure that all of their policies and practices are fully aligned with our guidelines and priority targets, which evolve over time.
That said, we stand in solidarity with strategic initiatives that pressure institutions who endorse BDS to address the demands of other racial, social, economic, climate and gender justice movements.
When and where possible, we hope that artists will take the necessary steps to pressure Live Nation to end its complicity. While tens of thousands of musicians have publicly supported PACBI’s call for the cultural boycott of Israel and the wider BDS movement, many music industry organizations have so far failed to keep up with the grassroots and mainstream support for BDS from their own artists and communities. It is long past time for the music industry itself to begin their own journeys to cut down and ultimately end complicity in Israel’s genocide and decades-old regime of apartheid against Palestinians. We deeply appreciate the support of artists and organizations alike, and we shall continue on this journey together. Israel’s oppression is sustained by international complicity; solidarity begins by ending it.