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Business News Live Business
What to make of slow live market in US this summer?
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 18 June 2010
Various US media have noted this week just how many gigs and tours and such like have been cancelled in America this year seemingly due to poor tickets sales, with Live Nation in particular having been forced to instigate a number a cancellations.
A recent missive from industry guru Bob Lefsetz cited one unnamed source who said that artists managed by talent agency CAA had cancelled 200 shows alone. Does this mean the live sector bubble has finally burst? Well, gloom-mongerers have predicted it before and it’s never come to pass.
One US music journalist and gloom-mongerer, Chicago Sun-Times’ Jim De Rogatis (actually, he’s just left the Sun-Times and is now writing online), reckons it means the Live Nation bubble has burst. He wrote this week: “During half a dozen chats that I had with concert industry insiders last week at the Event & Arena Marketing Conference, and in numerous other conversations with people in the business of late, the recurring prediction about the recently merged concert-industry behemoth Ticketmaster/Live Nation has been that recent layoffs, rivers of red ink on the profit statements, and the general unwieldiness of the massive corporation that many of its own employees call the Death Star will inevitably cause it to crash and burn, much as many in the oil industry are predicting that the disaster in the Gulf will lead to the demise of BP”.
It seems certain De Rogatis is jumping the gun somewhat in predicting Live Nation’s imminent doom, possibly for dramatic effect (which isn’t what we’re doing when we say MySpace will be offline by Christmas, obviously). As Billboard note: “Live Nation’s income statement has had red ink for years; revenues are in the billions, but profit margins are miniscule. [But] in the near term, the company can survive a bad summer: it has refinanced its debt, has plenty of cash and still has the faith of investors”.
But still, you can’t beat a bit of doom and gloom on a Friday lunchtime.
