PreferredSeat.com Blog

Live Nation stock dropped dramatically as CEO Michael Rapino explained the downturn in concert business to shareholders during a presentation Thursday. While admitting that the ticket business has been slow the first half of the year, Rapino is preparing for an even slower second half which promted the sell off.

As we posted last September “Ticketmaster’s Irving Azoff Reports on “dynamic pricing”, Concert Goers Better Prepare for the Worst“, the plan by Irving Azoff and Ticketmaster would not work because the fans will not stand for the higher prices. It is crazy that Rapino and Azoff would quote the airline industry as a model to raise concert ticket prices when everyone hates the airlines for that very reason.

And Live Nation and Ticketmaster are already feeling the heat when they’ve discounted tickets for concerts such as the Lilith Fair and fans find themselves next to fans that paid half of what they did. With Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the social media sites you cannot hide anything any more and fans will not accept the new method of extracting the most $$ from the fans.

The concert industry seems to be imploding this year and neither Live Nation or Ticketmaster has a clue on how to please the fans and send boatloads of money to the stockholders. The concert business has not exactly been the cash cow Irving and Azoff said it would be when they took all that money to merge Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and it’s about to get a whole lot worse.