Live Nation Hopes To Fatten Its Bottom Line With MP3 Sales (Yes, Really)

Live Nation is hoping to take a bit of a run at the all-in-one-type page that MySpace currently offers, one that has such innovative offerings as blogs, tour dates and a convenient place to purchase an act’s music. Today the company announced that it would sell MP3s from Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and EMI through pages on its web site, with the company’s fan club/e-commerce division MusicToday providing the backend. Branching out into a new revenue stream makes sense, since the company is on the hook for quite a few big-ticket expenses at this point, but is this going to even result in a trickle of new revenue?

While one unnamed artist complained to Wired‘s music blog Listening Post that what the iTunes Store lacks is a strong artist page with additional content, it’s sort of difficult for me to see the appeal of too much information on just one Web page. When I’m searching for a band’s tour dates, odds are I’ve already purchased the act’s music; same goes for an artist’s blog or other assorted extras that are designed to lure in fans. This plan is making me wonder if Live Nation’s artist pages won’t end up quite like their MySpace equivalents–you know, jammed with flashing crap that crashes my computer.

At this point, I’ve clicked on too many band homepages that give me six options of where to go for information about the band–Purevolume, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, another site that I’ll be unaware of until about 10 minutes before it closes down. Can one aspect of the music business just stick to doing one thing well before trying to monetize another poorly thought out idea?

Live Nation to Sell Major Label MP3s on Artist Pages [Listening Post]