Don’t discount sales of tickets

The concert promoter wants to break Ticketmaster’s lock.

By VINNEE TONG

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — Madonna’s $120 million recording and touring contract with Live Nation Inc. gives the concert promoter the opportunity to tap into concert, recording, merchandising and other lucrative revenue streams. But don’t discount the role that lowly ticket fees play.

The pop superstar’s deal to abandon Warner Music shows how far Live Nation is willing to go to break the hammerlock Barry Diller’s Ticketmaster has on online concert and sporting ticket sales.

Ticket buyers may be annoyed by the $5 or more in convenience and delivery fees tacked on to every ticket ordered online or over the phone, but they’ve proven to be a gold mine for Ticketmaster, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Regulatory filings show that Ticketmaster’s revenues jumped 14 percent to $1.1 billion in 2006 and generated almost a 25 percent operating profit margin for the nation’s largest seller of tickets.

Live Nation, whose 160 venues include House of Blues and Fillmore locations, Nikon at Jones Beach in New York and London’s Wembley Arena, currently is Ticketmaster’s largest single generator of ticketing fees. But Live Nation has signaled it wants to bring the fee revenue in-house when its Ticketmaster contract expires in 2008 for most of its locations and in 2009 at the House of Blues venues.

Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino has made no secret of his desire to use the company’s relationships with artists to get into related businesses. He has talked about selling T-shirts, parking passes, VIP party passes, secondary tickets and DVDs as well as broadcasting shows live. And gaining direct access to fans through ticket sales is seen as a crucial building block to collecting other profit related to the event.

Rapino said Live Nation owes its window of opportunity to the rise of the live show as a profit driver — instead of the records and CD sales as in previous years. “Thankfully for our business, the center of that pie has really become the live show now,” he said in September at a Goldman Sachs conference.

The possibility of having Live Nation as a competitor drew a bring-it-on response from Diller, chairman and chief executive of IAC, whose holdings also include the HSN home shopping network as well as Internet businesses including LendingTree, Citysearch, Evite, Match.com and the Ask.com search engine.

“We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our infrastructure. Let someone else make these investments and get into ticketing,” Diller said at a New York conference in September. “It’ll be good for us and interesting for them.”

About 22 percent of all event tickets are now sold online and they are expected to generate sales of $4.9 billion this year, according to Jupiter Research retail analyst Patti Freeman Evans.

But a greater number of sellers won’t automatically translate into lower prices or fewer fees for customers, she said. That’s because tickets are not wholly commoditized, and sellers who tack on bonuses like limousine rides, dinner or other goodies are aiming to capture a segment of the market from customers willing to pay more, Freeman Evans said.

Among the top shareholders of Live Nation, based in Beverly Hills, Calif., is L. Lowry Mays, founder of Clear Channel Communications and its CEO for 30 years until 2004. Mays owns 5.4 percent of the company, according to Capital IQ, a unit of Standard & Poor’s.

For its part, Ticketmaster has made its own moves to get closer to the fans. It has bought fan management Web site Echo Music and music sharing Web site iLike.com, as well as artist management company Front Line, which includes in its portfolio the Eagles, Christina Aguilera, Aerosmith, Jimmy Buffett and Paris Hilton the singer.