Live Nation - Future of the Music Biz??

[DreamRedux]

From Fortune Magazine:

<a href="http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/30/news/companies/live_nation.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007113012">Live Nation rocks the music industry - Michael Rapino, CEO of the Clear Channel spinoff, may just have this whole file-sharing, iTunes-listening, MySpace-Internet-era music thing all figured out.</a>

[quote]At the heart of Rapino's strategy is his company's ability to connect to 35 million people who attend Live Nation shows every year. Already Rapino has a database of more than 25 million concertgoers. Say you're looking for tickets to Coldplay, a group Live Nation promotes. If Rapino has his way, his company will sell you a downloaded song along with the ticket. Or maybe a T-shirt with a download. Or maybe the website will use its trove of consumer information to turn you on to a new band you might like. [/quote]
(Madonna rejected WB to sign up with LN.)

I found this interesting:
[quote]He wants Live Nation to sell all the tickets for its venues and vows to dump Ticketmaster as the company's main ticket seller after its contract expires at the end of 2008. In November he bought a leading merchandise company, Signatures, which licenses products for such heavyweights as U2 and Justin Timberlake.[/quote]
While I think it should be against the law to put "U2" and "Justin Timberlake" within 1000 words of each other, booting Ticketmaster sounds promising - as long as they don't tack on even larger charges!

Well, it's different, but it sounds a bit like the Wal-Mart-ing of the music industry.

I wonder if it will work?


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[Frau_Blucher]

It just sounds like a promoter wants to sell tickets, manage bands, and link in a bunch of crap merchandising all under one roof. Where in all this is there any mention of nurturing better music? It's still just a different flavor of push marketing - very old web and not innovative at all IMHO. I don't see any hint of a Web 2.0-like leveraging of shared info and tastes to create more powerful info or even business linkages. They just want to put an Amazon cookie on you and tell you what other shit you might like.

[deethelurker]

I have serious doubts -- that anyone could royally screw up music the way the record labels have been doing. Maybe the merchandise pushers will become so good at this with a small roster of superstar acts that they'll be able to afford to invest/take risks on lesser-known musical artists that don't fit in any easily identifiable musical categories. That's how the movie studios run things, and you see how many high quality offerings Hollywood manages to offer up around Oscar season and even outside that time frame. If the music business could be set up similarly, maybe an Eno for our ages can find him/herself with a greater platform from which to rock us all out of our socks, or maybe there will be enough room made for the smaller demand acts that many of our favorite "obscure" acts from earlier times will finally be able to find themselves getting some of the attention they've long deserved. I'd certainly love to see a renaissance period for The Sound, for example. Because, as I said, no one could possibly do a worse job than the record companies have been doing for at least the past 40 years.

[DreamRedux]

I agree Dee. If they could eventually start catering to the indy artists, it would be like one-stop, do-it-all shopping for them.

*sigh*

Wonder if it will happen, or more importantly, what they would ask the indy artist to give up for the sake of convenience.