{"id":4311,"date":"2011-06-29T13:57:02","date_gmt":"2011-06-29T21:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=4311"},"modified":"2011-06-29T13:57:02","modified_gmt":"2011-06-29T21:57:02","slug":"live-nation-salaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2011\/06\/29\/live-nation-salaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Live Nation Salaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve got to read this &quot;Fast Company&quot; article on Nathan Hubbard:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a title=\"Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/magazine\/157\/ticketmaster-nathan-hubbard-most-hated-brand\">Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In it Nathan decries my accusation that he made $5.7 million last year.<\/p>\n<p>He claims it&#8217;s untrue.\u00c2\u00a0 That most of it was stock options.\u00c2\u00a0 His 2010 salary and bonus WAS ONLY $1.3 million!<\/p>\n<p>$1.3 million.\u00c2\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n<p>Have we lost our minds here?\u00c2\u00a0 A corporation loses triple digit millions and you pay the employees a sum eclipsing the income of my whole neighborhood?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d hide too.\u00c2\u00a0 I wouldn&#8217;t respond either.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, I take issue with the other $4.4 million, the stock options that haven&#8217;t yet vested and theoretically won&#8217;t be worth anything if the stock doesn&#8217;t move up.<\/p>\n<p>The price can be moved downward.<\/p>\n<p>Just read this article:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nypost.com\/p\/news\/business\/bronfman_buck_cOdN4claUyvtpc3mIJuJDN\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Bronfman buck$\">Bronfman buck$<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The Warner Music board lowered the price at which Edgar Bronfman&#8217;s stock options vested, ensuring that he got paid.\u00c2\u00a0 Do you really think the Live Nation board won&#8217;t do the same thing?\u00c2\u00a0 A Live Nation board controlled by Irving Azoff?<\/p>\n<p>Both these companies are losing money.<\/p>\n<p>Sony loses 37% of its value under Howard Stringer and they cut his salary and bonus by 15%:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/06\/29\/technology\/29sony.html?_r=1&#038;ref=technology\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Sony Cuts Howard Stringer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Pay Package as Chairman by 15%\">Sony Cuts Howard Stringer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Pay Package as Chairman by 15%<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>We need more of that kind of thinking in the corporate world of music.<\/p>\n<p>If you own a private company, I don&#8217;t care how much money you make.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s yours!\u00c2\u00a0 Obey the law, pay your taxes and keep the rest.\u00c2\u00a0 But if you want the public to invest you&#8217;ve got a fiduciary duty, you have to put stockholders first, not yourself.\u00c2\u00a0 Steve Jobs famously takes only a dollar a year in salary.\u00c2\u00a0 Granted, he has made a fortune in stock options, but he rescued a company from the precipice and turned it into the second most valuable enterprise in America&#8230;do you really want to argue about how much he got paid?<\/p>\n<p>Not me.<\/p>\n<p>Deliver results, we&#8217;ll give you rewards.<\/p>\n<p>But all we&#8217;ve got right now with Ticketmaster is red ink.<\/p>\n<p>Then there&#8217;s U2.\u00c2\u00a0 In today&#8217;s &quot;Los Angeles Times&quot; there&#8217;s a story about IATSE picketing the band&#8217;s video shoot in Winnipeg:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a title=\"Matt Loeb of IATSE takes a more aggressive role\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2011\/jun\/27\/business\/la-fi-ct-loeb-20110621\">Matt Loeb of IATSE takes a more aggressive role<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>You can read a brief, comprehensive explanation of what happened here:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a title=\"U2 Picketed as 'Union Busters' by Stage Employees Group\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thewrap.com\/tv\/article\/u2-picketed-union-busters-stage-employees-group-27830\">U2 Picketed as &#8216;Union Busters&#8217; by Stage Employees Group<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And you&#8217;ve got the famously Irish U2&#8217;s tax evasion issue:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a title=\"Our Glastonbury U2 protest was a call for an ethical tax culture\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/2011\/jun\/28\/glastonbury-u2-tax-protest\">Our Glastonbury U2 protest was a call for an ethical tax culture<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Now if Bono were Gene Simmons, an egotistic money whore, I would not be so incensed.\u00c2\u00a0 But isn&#8217;t this the guy who&#8217;s trying to save the world?<\/p>\n<p>And speaking of Sony, did you see that Facebook hired George Hotz?<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a title=\"Facebook Hires Sony's Hacker\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Technology\/facebook-hires-sonys-hacker\/story?id=13948623\">Facebook Hires Sony&#8217;s Hacker<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In case you haven&#8217;t been paying attention, Mr. Hotz is the individual who cracked the iPhone and the PlayStation 3.<\/p>\n<p>You don&#8217;t sue these people, they know more than you do, you HIRE THEM!<\/p>\n<p>Facebook hiring George Hotz is like the record industry hiring Shawn Fanning.<\/p>\n<p>It should have.\u00c2\u00a0 Doug Morris, admittedly ignorant about technology, is now running Sony Music and recording revenue has been decimated.\u00c2\u00a0 Why is he in charge again?<\/p>\n<p>In other words, you can&#8217;t hire a techie to make the music.<\/p>\n<p>But you can sure hire a techie to market and sell it.<\/p>\n<p>You co-opt your enemies.\u00c2\u00a0 You don&#8217;t sue people who have more power than you.\u00c2\u00a0 We saw how well that worked out for the record industry, suing file traders&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 Bad publicity and continued sinking sales.\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?<\/p>\n<p>And for those of you still lamenting P2P piracy, please enter the new decade.\u00c2\u00a0 EVERYTHING&#8217;S AVAILABLE FOR FREE ON YOUTUBE!!\u00c2\u00a0 IT DOESN&#8217;T PAY TO STEAL!!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d love to see Nathan Hubbard revolutionize Ticketmaster.\u00c2\u00a0 And if Irving Azoff can make Live Nation work, more power to him.<\/p>\n<p>But that does not mean that these individuals should profit so handsomely as the corporation loses money.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not only the corporation and its investors, it&#8217;s Live Nation&#8217;s employees.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what&#8217;s wrong with America.\u00c2\u00a0 The rich get richer and the poor lose their jobs.\u00c2\u00a0 Scratch that, the middle class lose their jobs and become poor.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t think Live Nation and Ticketmaster can enter a steep decline, you haven&#8217;t watched the Sony movie.\u00c2\u00a0 Even worse, once upon a time people loved Sony, they&#8217;ve always hated Ticketmaster.<\/p>\n<p>In today&#8217;s world you give to get.\u00c2\u00a0 He who takes gets called out.<\/p>\n<p>And not to get all political on you, but after incessantly crying for federal spending to be cut, the &quot;Los Angeles Times&quot; revealed Michele Bachmann has been the beneficiary of federal funds:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"margin-right: 0px;\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\"><a title=\"Bachmann's had her share of government aid\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/nationworld\/nation\/la-na-bachmann-20110626,0,1896024.story\">Bachmann&#8217;s had her share of government aid<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s not trivial.\u00c2\u00a0 Her husband got $30k from Minnesota ($24k of it pass-through money from the federal government) and the family farm got $260k in farm subsidies.\u00c2\u00a0 She says the subsidies went to her in-laws, but she claimed between $32k and $105k on her financial disclosure forms.<\/p>\n<p>Huh?<\/p>\n<p>All I&#8217;m saying is we&#8217;ve got two classes in America.<\/p>\n<p>The rich profiteers and those scurrying to get on reality TV.<\/p>\n<p>Irving Azoff is a brilliant manager.\u00c2\u00a0 He did a great job of binding Ticketmaster to Live Nation.\u00c2\u00a0 But if he wanted to get on my good side, he too would work for a dollar plus stock options, he&#8217;d get the public on his side, now he just looks like a profiteer.<\/p>\n<p>As for Mr. Hubbard&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 He&#8217;s a smart bloke.\u00c2\u00a0 But wouldn&#8217;t it have been better to hire someone like George Hotz to run Ticketmaster?\u00c2\u00a0 Isn&#8217;t it really a data company?\u00c2\u00a0 Isn&#8217;t this where programmers triumph?<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve got to read this &quot;Fast Company&quot; article on Nathan Hubbard: Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America In it Nathan decries my accusation that he made $5.7 million last year. He claims it&#8217;s untrue.\u00c2\u00a0 That most of it was stock options.\u00c2\u00a0 His 2010 salary and bonus WAS ONLY $1.3 million! $1.3 million.\u00c2\u00a0 Why? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-17x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4311"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4315,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311\/revisions\/4315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}