Bob my boy,

I have purposefully stayed away from the Live Nation bashing because I believe that all this negative press about live entertainment and the incessant over-charging and subsequent discounting of our inventory is going to "come home to roost" for all of us (artists, managers, agents, promoters, etc.) lucky enough to make a living doing what we love.

The truth is my company is having our most successful year in its 10 year existence with Bon Jovi, the Black-Eyed Peas, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Daughtry, Leonard Cohen, our Latin touring division, Coachella, Stagecoach, New Orleans Jazzfest, thousands of one-offs in small venues, and, yes, a sixteen year-old prodigy named Justin Bieber.  Speaking of this emerging worldwide superstar, it was absolutely wrong and in poor taste to use a fictitious "canceled" Staples Center show on June 18th as an example of poorly peforming tours.  For the record, JB’s tour didn’t start until June 23rd and every show is either completely sold-out or will be by showtime.  This tour is one of the great success stories of 2010.  As far as the venue my competitors chose to use as an example, Staples Center is one of the greatest arenas in the world and has delivered many of LN’s largest grosses on even their under-performing tours.  Funny how their slide used an AEG Live tour and and an AEG venue to make a point.  That was misleading and just plain wrong like page 17 on their quarterly report.

Bob and fellow readers,  there needs to be an adjustment in how much we charge and how well we treat and interact with the consumer.  The road cannot completely fill the economic hole left by the transitioning recorded music business.  The guarantees have to come down to allow more realistic scaling of our tours, the secondary market needs to provide the consumer with a real value added experience and not just serve as a greedfest, artists cannot play markets over-and-over in the same touring cycle, and my competitors need to be less disengenuous and more responsible and transparent.

My sincere hope is that these "interesting" times will teach us all a lesson.  And I mean all of us!

Randy Phillips
President & CEO
AEG Live

I’ve got no sympathy.

Remember when rock stars used to O.D?  Yup, that was the peril of being on the road, doing too much smack to the point where you nodded out and had a blind date with the Grim Reaper.  If an "artist" is injured onstage doing a circus act, haven’t we lost the plot?  Didn’t we start to lose our way when we confused music with movies during the MTV era, creating stars that lasted just about as long as a film runs in the multiplex, with no afterlife?  Has everyone forgotten that first and foremost music is something you hear?  I mean how often do you shut your eyes in a movie?  Never.  Whereas go to a great show and you close your eyes and let your mind drift.  But in an attempt to keep up with the MTV visual nonsense, live shows became extravaganzas, the penumbra superseded the music. To the point where no one expects Britney to sing live and even Eminem lip-synched the other day. It’s one thing to have loops on stage as an effect, as James Taylor did in the days of yore, wheeling out a tape recorder to perform a duet with himself, but now it’s all smoke and mirrors, we’re not supposed to know that you really can’t sing or play.  But if you can’t sing or play, unless it’s intentional, like with some of the punk acts, remind me why we should pay attention again?  If you need to dazzle your customers visually to get them to come, you’re going down the wrong road.  At least Alice Cooper’s theatrics had to do with the plot of his music, singing about his nightmares and dead babies, exactly what does flying in the air on a trapeze have to do with Pink’s songs again?  And don’t tell me you can’t argue with the gross.  They came this time, but they won’t next time unless you’ve got more evanescent hits on the radio and you’ve got an even bigger stage show with more tricks.  The spiral goes straight down the drain.  If the music is not enough, we’re doomed.

Music when done right is the hottest medium there is.  Nothing can compete, not movies or sculpture or television or Facebook.  But you’ve got to respect it, you’ve got to own the imperfections and build upon them, not get so much plastic surgery that you look like Jocelyn Wildenstein.  Yes, that’s what today’s records are, plastic confections.  Built in studios by Pro Tools experts, you can dance to them, but they’ve got the nutritional value of a Sprite, sweet and sticky, you might like it going down but then you get sick.

I’m glad Pink wasn’t seriously hurt.  But come on.  Can’t it be about the MUSIC!

Pink FALLS, Rushed To Hospital

You probably saw this – but I find this rich.  On page 17 of Live Nation’s investor presentation, they present their vision of a "new model"

3 months from an artist posting a song online to selling out arenas.  huh?  even the major labels don’t expect something to take off that fast.  is this a company that understands artist development?  or is trying to sell a story to wall street?  actually, it’s both – but when forced to choose between one or the other it’s clear where they are coming down.

Live Nation’s investor presentation

This slide must be seen to be believed (or disbelieved, as the case may be!)

Click on the link, wait for the PDF to download and click on slide 17, where you will see that the "Old Model" is 2-5 years from writing a song to selling out an arena.  And now, under the "New Model", it takes THREE MONTHS!

Positivelymotherfuckinginsane.

Who do we fire first?  Rapino or Garner?  I’m not sure if this is an SEC violation, outright lying to the investor public, but not only is it a gross distortion of reality, it’s evidence that neither executive is into either artist development or CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT!

Anyone who lived through the MTV era of the eighties and nineties knows that instant success is followed by instant decline.  Therefore, forcing purveyors to constantly reinvent the wheel.  That’s what’s wrong in the movie business, that’s why they emulated the music business and went into sequels.  Yup, that’s what a career in music used to be, endless sequels!  Now it’s one hit wonders, which is why the labels are screwed.

But it’s worse.  Almost no one has a hit that can deliver sold out arenas.

Look at Rihanna, who canceled shows…  Didn’t she have enough hits?  She can’t sell out arenas.

Justin Bieber can sell out arenas today, but Mel Gibson is the biggest story online this week…and soon, after kicking the carcass, no one will want anything to do with the actor.

Come on.  Talk about spin.  This verges on outright lies.  And is bad for both music and Live Nation. This is how we got INTO this mess.

No wonder the stock went down by double digits during this inane PowerPoint presentation.

I don’t even use an iPhone.  As I’ve stated previously, I was on AT&T Wireless, the connections were so poor I switched to Verizon and have been happy ever since.

But this story fascinates me from a public relations viewpoint.

Apple doesn’t respond.  You can call Jobs a megalomaniac, you can say Macs are overpriced and the company remains mum.  Except for Jobs himself, who notoriously responds to an occasional e-mail.  I have my own theory about this, I believe in addition to wanting to gain customer feedback, take the pulse of his constituency, he loves the human contact.  After all, we’re all animals at the core, and one can be surrounded by sycophants for only so long.  Without input from Joe Average, you lose touch.  Which is one of the reasons why the first album by an act is so much better than the fourth.  Then there’s someone like Joni Mitchell, who went to Greece and was inspired to create "Blue" and drove cross-country and created her other masterpiece, "Hejira".  You don’t want to lose touch.  But once word is out, that you’re traveling amongst the unwashed, the haters pile on.  Ever notice it?  A star gives one autograph, and then the hordes descend upon him.  Worse is the need to tear down everybody above you, as Dylan so eloquently put it:

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

That’s where Jobs is now.  Knowing that he reads and responds, haters bait him.  And part of this baiting and posting revved up Antennagate.

But really, Antennagate was fueled by the news media.  Both old and new school, online and print. And Apple tolerated it all until truly old media, "Consumer Reports", entered the picture.

Let’s be clear, Apple made an initial announcement, that there really was no problem, that it was all a software issue.  If only the company had stated that how you grip a phone is responsible for signal strength back then (then again, in e-mail, Jobs did say just to grip the phone in a different way).  Point being, you’ve got to be truthful from the inception, and one can argue Apple broke this rule, they obfuscated.  This hurts the company’s image.  To what degree and for how long?  Time will tell.

But once "Consumer Reports" stated it could not recommend the iPhone 4, despite the handset getting its best rating, old media piled on.  After all, when CR trashed the Lexus GX 460, Toyota immediately did a mea culpa, took the car off the market, fixed it.  Because you don’t argue with "Consumer Reports".  Hell, Suzuki did and it almost put the company out of business in the U.S.

So not only are blogs piling on, but the "Wall Street Journal" and the "New York Times" too…they’re baiting the company like bloggers bait Jobs in e-mail…WATCHA GONNA DO!  Apple’s finally fucked up.  Didn’t that Microsoft employee call the iPhone 4 Apple’s Vista?

And one thing we know about Jobs is he has a high opinion of himself.  He can’t apologize.  And can you really recall three million phones?  And does the company have a fix anyway?

Word immediately leaked out from the press conference, Apple would provide a free bumper, even give a refund for those who already bought one.  Good will, but doesn’t speak to the problem.  I bought a defective unit and you don’t care about me!

So, either you’ve got to stonewall, like Live Nation, saying there’s no problem, or immediately roll over like Lexus, with the GX 460.

Jobs did neither.  He presented facts.

Watch the presentation.  It’s mindblowing.  You may still hate Jobs, but by time he’s through he’s convinced you there’s nothing truly wrong with the iPhone 4, it’s the equal, if not superior to its competitors, and Apple truly cares about its customers.

This is like the health care debate.  No matter which side you were on, pro or con, we can all agree that after Scott Brown got elected, the mainstream media said health care reform was finished.  But it passed.

You can analogize this to Reagan breaking the unions, most specifically, that of the air traffic controllers.  You’ve got to back down, don’t mess with the unions!  But Reagan did, and union power hasn’t been the same since, irrelevant of your opinion of this.

In this case, Steve Jobs forged a new public relations path.  Addressing the conflagration while minimizing it, not getting his dander up, like Michael Rapino and Jason Garner at yesterday’s Live Nation presentation, Steve said I’m your friend and let me show you the facts.

It’s hard to argue with the facts.

Where were the facts in the Live Nation presentation?  The ones we truly wanted.  Exactly how many shows were canceled?  How many tickets were sold at a discount or even given away?  Release all this data, show where the Ticketmaster fees go and…the public would be silenced.

Live Nation’s got to make a profit.  Show that the profit is in the fees and suddenly, it’s the act’s problem.  And then the act has to back down.  And there’s progress.

But Live Nation believes it must protect the acts and the agents at all costs.  Certainly Ticketmaster believes this.  So both are whipping boys.  Hell, Live Nation could admit its mistakes.  It did say it overpaid for shows, but the mea culpa was limited.

In the new world, the connected Internet world, rage can build overnight.  But you’ve got the ability to respond instantly, from your own platform.  Hell, the below video was hosted by Apple itself.  Will everybody watch it?  No.  But fanboys will, and continue to use their iPhone 4’s, and the mania will continue, the positive mania, that is driving Apple’s sales and stock…we all want to play with a winner, and somehow Steve Jobs and Apple are still such, even though yesterday it appeared they were on the ropes.

Confront adversity head on.  Don’t lose your cool, don’t get defensive, when those in power do so they become objects of ridicule.  We live in an era of transparency, air your dirty laundry yourself and everybody else calms down.  What, yesterday Live Nation said reporters were keeping bands from hitting the road in the fall?  By writing about summer tour disasters?  You get to create your own perception, via facts.  If Jason Garner and Michael Rapino want bands to go on the road, they’ve got to convince them with facts, not innuendo.

Then again, you’ve got to have a good product to begin with.

But if you do your best, create something great, and are truly transparent, the public will be on your side, not that of the haters.

It’s a new world.  Pundits mean less than ever before.  You control your own destiny.

July 16 Press Conference