A second important type of evidence to which the antitrust authorities look in order to gain insight into how the merger will affect future conduct in the sector is to examine past behavior, particularly “industry participants’ behavior in tracking and responding to price changed by some or all rivals”DOJ/FTC, 2010:11.  Here the record is particularly troubling.  The leading firms in the sector have engaged in a repeated pattern of anti-consumer and anticompetitive behavior.  In the mid-1990s, the major record labels engaged in two practices that imposed severe harm on consumers and competition.  They eliminated the sale of singles, even though the CD was well-suited for the sale of singles.  They adopted a price fixing scheme to keep album prices high, even though the new compact disc CD format dramatically lowered their costs and discounters had lowered prices.  In short, they restricted output and raised prices, forcing consumers to unnecessarily purchase hundreds of millions of overpriced CDs to get the music that they wanted.  An antitrust consent decree ended price fixing FTC: 2000 and digital distribution made the sale of singles a compelling alternative. Nestor, 2012  1.  

via The Role of Antitrust in Protecting Competition, Innovation, and Consumers as the Digital Revolution Matures: The Case against the Universal-EMI Merger and E-Book Price Fixing | Public Knowledge.