Azoff: 'e's off

Irving Azoff, who has been guiding the unholy marriage of Ticketmaster and LiveNation, stepped down on New Years Eve. Azoff suggests that he's just not cut out for life in a public company. He's planning to set up another management company to farm his increasingly long-in-the-tooth clients.

Rihanna tries to avoid a soaking

More misery from the US live music scene, where greed-and-Ticketmaster-LiveNation have combined to suffocate a golden goose: Rihanna is axing dates across the US rather than turn up to empty rooms.

The Denver date has followed Phoenix, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Dallas and Washington down the drain; Simon and Garfunkel have also been paring back their itinerary as people decide not to pay silly money for a night out.

The Rihanna tour is going under the banner The Last Girl On Earth; ticket sales are so slow she might have wound up The Only Person In The Arena.

Ticketmaster/Live Nation: Go on, do it

The age of pretend choice in major live events ticketing is drawing to a close, as America follows Britian in indicated governmental relaxity with a Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger.

The Justice Department have pretended to be all strict and pretend to insist on countermeasures:

Under the proposed settlement, Ticketmaster must sell its Paciolan ticketing unit to Comcast-Spectacor which has already signed a letter of intent, or to another company approved by the Justice Department, the agency said.

Additionally, the merged company would be barred from retaliating against any venue owner that uses another company's ticketing or promotional services and must license its primary ticketing software to Anschutz Entertainment Group, the Justice Department said.

Ticketmaster are said to be happy to do this, just as soon as they've jacked up the mysterious booking fee to maximum.

Ticketmaster: Competition Commission smile

It's the most wonderful time of the year; the time when people slip out unpopular announcements in the hope that nobody notices.

Like the Competition Commission's decision that, actually, the creation of a Ticketmaster/LiveNation behemoth won't crush the customers under its weight:

[A]fter lobbying from the two companies which argued that critics had overstated their influence in the music industry, the commission dropped its opposition. Christopher Clarke, deputy chair of the commission, admitted it was "unusual" for the competition watchdog to change its mind in this way.

A key plank in the commission's ruling was the damage that could be caused to German ticketing firm CTS Eventim, which signed a deal with Live Nation to expand into the UK in 2007. Now, though, the commission has accepted Live Nation's argument that CTS will not lose out, and that it would be complicated and unfair to force the merged entity to sell off its UK ticketing arm.

Oh, it would be complicated, would it? Oh, how frightfully rotten that would be. You wouldn't want to make the otherwise completely zipless union of two totally separate companies to become a little complicated, would you? Not if the only thing it would do would be to stop a massive corporation stitching up the live music market in the UK.

Ticketmaster/Live Nation - not so fast...

Given that, working on their own, Ticketmaster and LiveNation hardly work in the consumer's interest, it's perhaps unsurprising that the Competition Commission has come out against them uniting into one near-Monopoly.

Department of Justice wants a closer look at Ticketmaster-LiveNation

If Ticketmaster and LiveNation were hoping to be given an easy ride into a merger, they're going to be disappointed. The tie-up is being given a closer eye, with the Department of Justice calling for more details.

Meanwhile, Ticketmaster is suffering from, oh, too much success:

Ticketmaster chairman Barry Diller repeated his denial of that practice late Thursday. He also said the complaints that fans were shut out of Phish and Michael Jackson concerts were due to the tickets selling out in seconds.

"Oddly, the better we sell tickets, the more unpopular we become," Diller said.

Equally oddly, the more clumsy and clunky your systems are, the more people who get booted out, or dumped back at the log-in screen, or can't even get on in the first place, the more unpopular you become. Oddly, the more obscure mark-ups to ticket prices you come up with, the more unpopular you become. The more you try to form a large, monopoly-tang behemoth, the more unpopular you become. It's like you can't get an even break, innit?

Only a massive monopoly ticketbeast can save music, says massive monopoly ticketbeast

The proposals to merge Ticketmaster and LiveNation into a single focus of hatred and disgust have come before the wise lawmakers on Capitol Hill, with attempts to save the entire US economy taking back seat to hearings on the plan:

The subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights used the approximately 90-minute hearing to discuss how the possible merger could affect ticket prices, the impact it would have on new ticketing businesses wanting to enter the marketplace and how it might expose sales data from rival promoters, among other issues.

They also crammed in a few questions on what it would mean for Guam, the likelihood of life on other planets and why gorillas don't keep evolving into people. After all, you'd find it difficult to fill an hour and a half with just the future of live music.

The CEOs of the two companies went to Washington, to tell everyone how great their new world would be made. Live Nation president/CEO Michael Rapino and Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff can hardly wait to be allowed to make out in public. It's not just a new world they're proposing - it's a whole different world. One with different physics in:

"Artists don't sit around and say, 'Let's raise prices,'" said Azoff, who also heads up Ticketmaster's Front Line Management, which has a roster of more than 200 acts. "If we're successful in doing this, I for sure think we'll be able to show that ticket prices will go down, because it will create a bigger pot of money for artists from other avenues in their careers."

Ah yes. Because merging a giant promotion company with a giant ticket agency is an action which generates large pots of money from out of nowhere. Like when you open a self-seal envelope in the dark and it makes blue light. That's exactly the way this will make money.

Let's buy Azoff's starling claim for just a moment, and imagine Kid Rock and his manager getting ready to set prices for his shows next summer.

- Hey, Kid, you were going to charge thirty bucks a ticket, right?
- Yeah
- Did you know that the geological collision of Ticketmaster and LiveNation has created huge new pots of money?
- No... can we have some of that money?
- Yes. Yes, we can.
- Right. So... given that we've got all this new money, do we want to drop the prices of tickets any?
- Do we have to? Because of the new money?
- Well... no. But we could. We could share our good fortune with the fans.
[long, awkward pause]
- Okay, thirty bucks a ticket it is.
- Plus booking fee.
- Plus booking fee.

And that fee is where the real trouble lies. Sure, bands might not put up their prices simply because Evil and Evil have become Consolidated Evil, but surely the whole being-less-competition-in-the-music-ticketing-business might very well force up the fees being charged on top of the ticket price?

I could be wrong, though. Apparently the concert-goers will welcome their new twin-faced, one-bodied overlords with in-street merry jigging:

Rapino said the combined companies would not hurt music fans or rival businesses. "This deal would benefit them as we spur competition and innovation," he said. "If we don't make significant changes to the business model and if we don't build new structures, we may be back here in the future for another hearing on the death of the American music industry."

Nothing spurs competition like having a single, unassailable corporate monolith at the heart of an industry. Who does TicketNation think is going to be competing with them, as they suck up every ticket deal for every venue of any size in the US? Does he think that the free market will suddenly spur everyone to travel to Boise to go and see jugbands as a result of the merger?

Still: you've got it there in black and white - if you don't let the executives share a board table, you will kill music. Think hard, and picture a world where LiveNation does a bit of ticketing and mostly promotes, and Ticketmaster does a bit of management but mostly charges scandalous mark-ups on ticket prices. What does that world sound like? It's silent, isn't it? Even the birds will stop singing if this merger is allowed to fail.

It's as serious as that.

Still, there's all those other ticketing businesses:

Azoff argued that the merger could bring new opportunities for existing ticketing companies. "We've been told and we believe that if this merger were approved, that many of our larger clients would opt out," he said, pointing out that Ticketmaster has about 11,000 clients. "From hearing all the comments that I hear, I think that so many people would be upset about this merger that I'm sure a lot of our clients would leave."

Not, of course, that anyone is upset at the merger. Azoff is quite blase about the prospect of other clients running to those other ticket agencies, such as... uh, the other ticket places. Almost as if, ooh, his new company would run a load of large venues, represent the management of several big bands and promote a sizeable chunk of America's live music.

As a general rule of thumb, if a manager is prepared to stand up in public and virtually hope that customers might take their business elsewhere, the customers are unlikely to be blue chip.

Some promoters are worried that Ticketmaster having a big promotions business of their own would leave their data open to being shown to the competition:

Rapino assured the subcommittee that Live Nation Entertainment's concert division "would not have access to the ticketing division data. He added, "the concert division should have no access to anything [...] any other promoter does in any building or anything in the ticketing business."

And, if we've learned one thing in the last twelve months, you can always rely on a massive corporation to be nothing other than totally trustworthy.

Damn - I had drawn 'consumer-facing synergetic value release' in the sweepstake

Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff can't contain his excitement at the new, merged Live Nation-Ticketmaster hybrid:

"This merger will create a pipeline for all rights holders to reach their consumers, whether it is our team, an artist or a record company.

It is time that our business delivered forward thinking marketing solutions and we intend to do just that."

Let's just hope when they put tickets for forward thinking marketing pipelines on sale, they don't screw up, tell people they're sold out and try and offer them the same thing with a seventy-thousand per cent mark-up, eh?

Still, let's be fair - the man is honest. He didn't create a piece of meaningless, impenetrable marketing crapola to try and pretend there's anything in it for the consumers.

To be really fair, I should point out that Azoff wasn't using a clunking metaphor when he spoke of a pipeline; LiveNation Ticketmaster Don't Mention Ticketmaster are actually developing a pipeline to deliver musicians to customers. Early tests have been a bit buggy; the beta service was suspended when Jordan Knight was delivered at a dangerously high pressure and took out two family homes and a small dairy in Missouri.

Two become one: LiveNation, Ticketmaster complete merger

The board are still deciding if they'll just have one giant boot to tread on the face of gig-going humanity forever, or if they'll continue to use two smaller boots, but the Ticketmaster - LiveNation merger is go. The surprise? They're dropping the Ticketmaster name from the new company:

The combined company will be called Live Nation Entertainment.

The combined entity will have to try and somehow convince competition authorities that this isn't anti-competitive; if they can manage that they'll form into a single blob.

In future, only one company will gouge you for booking fees

The proposed merger of LiveNation and Ticketmaster into one single near-monopoly booking agency does have something going for it: with just one company, Live Nation Ticketmaster, to rail at, it's going to leave a fist free for waving at someone else.