Live Nation Ticketmaster megacorp, inc.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that talks are underway for a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

I don’t need to tell you how bad this would be for the people I deal with in the music industry world. I’ll leave it to the others, as I’ve got a whole lot of other work to do this week.

See:

• Billboard
• Paste
• Wired’s Epicenter
• Coolfer and again
• Brooklyn Vegan
• Hitsville
• Idolator

I have to keep this cut-and-paste journalism today. Here are the critical quotes:

WSJ:

Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. and Live Nation Inc. are close to a merger, people familiar with the matter said, in a deal that would consolidate two of the most powerful forces in the music industry under one roof.

The newly created company would be called Live Nation Ticketmaster, and would combine the world’s biggest concert promoter with the world’s dominant ticketing and artist-management company. The combined firm would be able to take advantage of close relationships with hundreds of major artists to find new ways to do business in the ailing music industry.

Because it would be so vertically integrated, the new company would also be able to muscle out competing concert promoters and have more power to dictate ticket prices to consumers.

Coolfer:

If regulators could stomach Ticketmaster’s market dominance before Live Nation got into ticketing, it should be able to withstand this merger.

Hitsville:

[after a good discussion of the implication of also merging in Front Line Management] I hope that the deal may also provoke discussion about what a useless and parasitical institution Ticketmaster is.

In an ideal world, Live Nation would merge with Ticketmaster and essentially shut it down.

Consider: When you go to the grocery store, a guy doesn’t step between you and the cash register demanding a $5 handling fee for the privilege of checking out.

Epicenter:

A combined Live Nation Ticketmaster entity could be greater than the sum of its parts — at least as far as the company is concerned. By controlling venues, ticketing, ancillary revenues derived from concerts and in some cases acting as an artist’s record label as part of the “360 deals” Live Nation has signed with high-profile artists like Nickelback and Jay-Z, the new company would be able to cross-promote and market to music fans using a vast database of user information.

Idolator:

So this is one of those path-clearing moves that allows lots of smaller organisms (which the people geared toward norms would refer to as ‘weeds,’ but which I know too better to do so with) to grow and maybe thrive, right? Anyone want to start their countdown clock to the real end of the Major Big Huge Music Industry As We Know It yet?

Paste:

This comes at a difficult time for the music industry. With record sales continually sinking and no quick way to resolve it, artists, promoters and managers are forced to look elsewhere to increase revenues; concerts and corporate sponsorships is one avenue. With the merger, the companies will be able to combine their forces to create a entertainment conglomerate and package artists in novel ways. The WSJ gives the example of a cell-phone provider sponsoring a concert tour and selling an exclusive download of a song.

This news may signify the dawn of a new age for top players in the music industry, but what does this mean for the fans? The WSJ writes that the merger would give a mega-boost to the companies’ power over the industry, allowing them to overpower competing concert promoters and dictate ticket prices.

There’s an angle missing here too. The independent promoters and ticketing agencies of the world are having a very hard time making ends meet already, given how tightly cooperative (if not collusive) Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and the major management agencies have been. I can also add that a fellow student here who does anti-trust at the Department of Justice says that they likely will be investigating this closely. As he puts it, “we so rarely see a real anti-trust case, we get excited when one looks legitimate.”

More to follow. I’m going to the Future of Music Coalition DC Policy Day next week, so hopefully I can meet up with others studying this and see how they feel about the merger (they’re doing a big focus on the state of broadcasting – it’s worth noting that Live Nation spun out of Clear Channel, so they might have more than normal to say on this front).

Update: my friend Mike passed along this Consumerist article pretty close to point: Congressman Pascrell (D-NJ) wants to investigate how, with the sale of Bruce Springsteen’s latest tour, the Ticketmaster website for “direct” sales collapsed under the traffic, and then redirected fans to the TM’s “TicketsNow” secondary market site, where ticket prices are marked up nearly tenfold. And also how the TicketsNow website seemed well stocked with tickets immediately after the Boss went on sale. Reminds me of the issues Live Nation was having with Phish tickets last week (I may add that when Phish festival tickets were being sold through local promoters and local ticketing agencies, right up until the second hiatus in 2004, we did not have these problems).