Bob,

I read your column on Live Nation with great interest yesterday.  If you dialed into one of their quarterly analysts’ calls, read their myriad of press releases, and/or reprinted their 10K, you could have saved the time it took you to drive to Civic Center Drive.  The following are some of my responses since the slant on your blog makes it sound like any attempt at competing with this 800 pound gorilla is pointless.  This kind of "anti-innovative" thinking coincides with your premise that there is no room for new ideas or invention on the web because Google, Amazon, and a shrinking Ticketmaster.com already exist.  

Here are my responses:

1).  AEG Live’s combination of touring, regional offices, real estate with roofs, festivals, and secondary ticketing yield a margin greater than 4% since we built, rather than bought, our EBITDA and carry very little debt on our books.

2).  Cirque du Soleil and the Bell Centre in Montreal, where the Montreal Canadians and more than 40 concerts played last year, have been doing transactions on their websites for more than 2 years with no reduction in their business since leaving Ticketmaster. They are building their unique brands and now have a direct relation with their customers. Considering your source, I doubt that Live Nation lost 25% of its revenue by "doing it themselves."  This may have had more to do with pricing and content choices, since the CTS software functions quite well for our AEG arenas in Germany and Livenation.com never engendered the same kind of consumer loyalty that Amazon.com or iTunes.com have.

3).  AEG decided that it made more sense to build our owned brands, not a third party’s, which is why we switched to Outbox. Coke does not market Pepsi and vice-versa.  This is not an ’80s model, this is a 2011+ business strategy that takes advantage of all the internet has to offer from data mining to data sharing to interaction with our consumers and so on, while allowing us and our partners (facilities, artist clients, sponsors, independent promoters, etc.) direct access to and ownership of all the data "our" content generates.

4).  After the "illuminating" presentation made by Mr. Azoff, Mr. Rapino, and Mr. Hubbard you wrote that: "They decentralized buying….it’s a local business" .  Thanks for so astutely defending my argument why the sale of tickets does not benefit from a national platform the way a mass marketer or distributor would.

Additionally, Fred Rosen asked me to thank you for reminding his current and future clients that he is "all about the buildings."  That is how Ticketmaster was created and the fact that the merged LN/TM have moved away from that model, has created a real competitive environment that gives facilities, content distributors, artists, and independent promoters a choice in how they interact with the public.

It amuses me that Irving and Mike felt compelled to "schmooze" you after my previous response when Irving, who I consider very bright and a friend, admonished me at the last Lakers’ home game for engaging in your blog.  If I realized that you could be so easily co-opted, I would have invited you to my office for an afternoon tea.

Randy Phillips