Four Corners Looks at Live Nation.

Australia lets us look at competition.

Hi!

Australia’s Four Corners looks at Live Nation’s impact on the ticketing business in Australia.

Here’s the full 45-minute report.

Live Nation responds in full here.

Some key points for me:

• The acceleration of consolidation has had an impact over the last 5 years. This is exactly what Scott Galloway meant by saying COVID was an accelerant.

• The legal letter of complaint defense is a classic deflection move that Mehrsa Baradaran highlights in her new book, The Quiet Coup.

• The lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice echoes the accusation that people will not speak out against Live Nation due to concerns about retribution.

• Peter Noble mentions that the festival business in Australia is facing an “extinction event”. This sounds dire until you see the festival business globally.

• Peter Garrett’s answer on artists setting the price is really interesting.

All of this points me towards Tim Chambers’ piece ‘In Other News,’ in which he points out that the industry has been able to extract more money out of the same-sized audience.

What do you make of this report?

Tell me by hitting reply.

My takeaways:

• The ticket business needs competition. This will drive better practices around marketing, programming, and technology.

• Competition is the key to a capitalist system. No competition, we don’t have a “free market”. So, every argument is nonsense without some form of competition.

Which brings me to this profile of Lina Khan.

Lina Khan’s profile is worth your time:

The key part here is how monopolization hurts your ability to speak out.

From my perspective, monopolization does several things:

• Slows or stops innovation

• Squashes dissent

• Kills jobs

• Harms worker pay

• Etc.

I could go on.

BTW, I was on the “Arts Reimagined” podcast. I didn’t hold back:

A Few Remnants From the Cutting Room Floor:

These things I looked at and never worked into the newsletter before…maybe not complete thoughts, but interesting all the same.

The status of Lyte’s business is still in question:

All we have are bits and pieces of a story around Lyte.

The Ticketing Business article linked to above talks about one of the big issues potentially being the acquisition of Festickets’ assets in 2022.

I can’t say for sure if that is accurate or the ultimate reason for the current situation, but I can point you to a few important ideas about strategy, acquisitions, and partnerships that is likely to matter as we see some consolidation with any number of businesses are rumored to have little or no runway or are looking for acquisition partners.

Acquisitions seem like a good thing, but almost everyone fails:

I’m talking about 70-90%.

How do you do these well?

Ask these questions.

1. Does it fit your strategy?

2. What are you really gaining?

3. Does it matter to your strategy?

Don’t get into the implementation or potential working environment until you know what you buy and why.

Remember the “Power Framework”:

My professor, Kamal Munir, taught me this years ago.

It holds up.

A good strategy revolves around gaining power in three areas:

• v. Customers

• v. Competition

• v. Supplier

The Festicket acquisition is highlighted and discussed in terms of changing the dynamics of Lyte’s relationship with the market.

Lyte went from compliment to competitor.

That changed the power dynamics.

Your acquisition needs to understand the power dynamic.

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