Ellie Goulding Sues Ex-Management Company Over Live Nation Ties
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Ellie Goulding is suing her former UK management company, TaP Management, alleging it failed to disclose a conflict of interest arising from Live Nation's ownership stake in the firm. The lawsuit claims that between 2018 and 2025, while Goulding was a TaP client, her management team repeatedly steered her towards deals with Live Nation and its subsidiaries for concert promotion, merchandise and a documentary, without telling her that Live Nation held a majority and later full stake in TaP.
Live Nation acquired 50.1 percent of TaP in 2015 and the remainder in 2019, but Goulding says this was never disclosed to her. She accuses TaP founders Benedict Mawson and Edward Millett, along with Live Nation's parent company HNOE, of breaching their duty to secure her the best possible commercial terms, given their financial interest in her dealing with Live Nation entities. Goulding, who signed with TaP in 2018 and parted ways with the firm in December 2025, is seeking unspecified damages; Live Nation itself is not named as a defendant, and neither TaP nor its founders have yet responded to requests for comment.
- Ellie Goulding sues ex-managers TaP over undisclosed Live Nation ownership stake
- Claims she was steered towards Live Nation deals without conflict disclosure
- Seeking unspecified damages; Live Nation not named as a defendant
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Ellie Goulding is a British singer-songwriter known for hits including "Lights" and "Love Me Like You Do", who has built a long career in pop music since the late 2000s. Artists like her typically rely on a management company to handle their business affairs, including negotiating deals for tours, merchandise and other commercial ventures on their behalf.
TaP Management is a UK-based artist management firm that represented Goulding from 2018 until the end of 2025. Live Nation is one of the world's largest live entertainment companies, promoting concerts and tours globally; it also owns Ticketmaster and has faced scrutiny in recent years over its dominance of the live music industry.
The case centres on the fact that Live Nation took a majority stake in TaP in 2015 and full ownership in 2019, meaning the company advising Goulding on her deals had a financial relationship with the company on the other side of many of those deals. This kind of arrangement matters because management firms are generally expected to act purely in their client's interest, and undisclosed ownership links of this sort raise broader questions about how common such conflicts might be elsewhere in the music industry.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Advocates for Goulding's position would argue that management companies owe their clients undivided loyalty and a duty to negotiate the best possible terms, and that this duty is fundamentally compromised when the manager's parent company sits on the other side of the negotiating table. They would say artists rely on managers precisely because they lack the resources to scrutinise every deal themselves, so non-disclosure of an owner's financial stake in counterparties they were steering her towards is a serious breach of trust, regardless of whether individual deals were commercially fair on paper.
The case against
Those sympathetic to TaP and Live Nation might argue that vertical integration between management, promotion and merchandising is common industry practice and can benefit artists through better coordination and leverage, and that the acquisition of TaP was a matter of public corporate record rather than a hidden secret. They would also note that deals still had to be commercially competitive to be accepted, that Goulding's team or advisers could reasonably have been expected to be aware of industry ownership structures, and that no wrongdoing has been established, since the allegations are as yet unproven and the defendants have not had the opportunity to respond.