That booming evil laughter you heard echoing across the sky earlier today came from the board room where Live Nation and Ticketmaster agreed to an all-stock merger between their two blighted companies. Ticketmaster Chairman Barry Diller says the merger will benefit customers, who are frequently “frustrated by their ticket buying experiences.” Oh! So by merging the two companies most responsible for those frustrations, we’ll cancel them out! This is doubleplus good, right?
Diller blames artists for your lousy ticket experiences, by the way:
“Ticketmaster does not set prices, Live Nation doesn’t set prices. Artists set the prices,” Diller said on a conference call. “Everyone else is just a distributor or a service provider.”
Lawmakers say they’ll give the merger a supposedly thorough review:
The agreement would “send ticket prices through the roof,” U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said today in an e-mailed statement.
“I will take a very close look at this merger before anything moves forward,” said Schumer, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee and called on the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to view the deal skeptically.
The new company will be called Live Nation Entertainment, which Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff confirmed on a conference call was a deliberate attempt to get away from the negative associations of his current company.
Oh, also, it was Visa’s fault that they couldn’t sell those Springsteen tickets more fairly. Diller said so.
“Live Nation, Ticketmaster to Merge in All-Stock Deal “ [Bloomberg]
(Photo: gruntzooki)
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Great. I can’t wait to not go to even more Ticketmaster ticketed shows. If there’s a band I must go see live, I’ll burn as much if not more of the equivalent in convenience fees in gas to go to the box office and get tickets directly.
There’s no way this will get through Justice. In fact, I’d advocate that Justice look at breaking up their existing stranglehold on this market. Historically, TM has eventually crushed all smaller competitors. Ticketron and SCI Ticketing are two examples. I know its not a service essential to daily survival, but neither was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and this is WAY more annoying.
As sad as the conglomeration seems, I wish it would have happened a couple of weeks ago. Say what you want about Ticketmaster, but at least they’ve built an online ticketing system that can handle traffic spikes. Live Nation’s ticketing system is *TERRIBLE*. Very underpowered for the artists they thought they could serve.
It took me two hours to buy tickets for a Phish show that went on sale two weeks ago. Their site was hammered and they had neither the servers nor the bandwidth to handle the load. I had excellent seats in my cart more than once and lost them to a timed out checkout process. A sad day for me indeed.
All I can say is this is the best thing to happen to music ever. The last place artists had to make money after being forced into contracts with their CD sales was live venues. Now they don’t even have that. (not that this hasn’t been the situation for a long while now anyways, just saying this is another nail in the coffin)
this is why I stopped going to most concerts…looks like that trend will continue.
Something related about a “borg” comes to mind in considering this merger…
Well, Justice says they’re going to look into it. Just like they did for XM+Sirius, I’m sure.
Irving Azoff is the CEO of Ticketmaster?? He’s the guy that came up with the idea to screw Don Felder out of royalties during The Eagles “Hell Freezes Over” tour. Don Felder ended up settling out of court for an un-disclosed amount but I bet it was a huge sum. This guy is a greedy scum bag. Ticket prices will go through the roof and theres nothing we can do about it.
Anyone want to play Monopoly?
Hey, I’ll bet this goes through, and then we’ll get people claiming it’s not a monopoly cuz you have an ipod!
Fees are the least of my worries… Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s website was downed by the overwhelming demand they self-inflicted by beginning to sell tickets for 18 different Dave Matthews Band concerts today. If you can’t support the demand, well then why not spread it out a little?????
This has been a repeated problem with this concert series, even since they began selling American Express pre-sale tickets. There’s got to be a better system!!!!