Guns N’ Roses are going to “vigorously contest” claims that they ripped off German electro-composer Ulrich Schnauss for the ambient intro to their song “Riad N’ The Bedouins,” a dispute that’s currently the source of a million-dollar lawsuit filed last week. (A million dollars may seem like a lot of cash for an album that had such a soft landing on the retail scene, but then again, the album’s production costs were probably way higher than that.) GNR manager Irving Azoff released a denial that’s both vehement and somewhat masterful: More »
Supermanager Irving Azoff and radio megaglomerate Clear Channel have teamed up to launch “a.p.e. radio,” an all-lowercase effort that will allow people who just can’t seem to find a space on the dial that’s playing “Hotel California” or that Weezer song about Beverly Hills ad nauseam to tune in to artist-specific channels (similar to the ones on Sirius/XM) on CC’s iheartradio network. (Lowercase all theirs, not mine.) The first clients of Azoff’s Front Line Management to get the personalized radio stations: The Eagles, Christina Aguilera, and Weezer. Unfortunately, there’s no word yet on whether Guns N’ Roses will also get this treatment, possibly because Front Line isn’t sure whether or not Axl Rose has fired the company for the fifth time this month. [FMQB via Hipsters United] More »
Bill Wyman’s in-depth coverage of the Congressional hearings on the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger continued today, as he live-blogged the House hearings on the merger. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said that he doesn’t hear complaints about high ticket prices (man, those upper-management bubbles must be pretty thick!), that $50 isn’t a high price for a concert ticket (not that he’s had to pay for any in a while), and that Ticketmaster’s service fees also get kicked back to venues and artists, causing Rep. Brad Sherman to respond, “They are forcing [Ticketmaster CEO Irving] Azoff to pretend like he’s charging a lot when it’s really coming back to you”; Azoff also said early in the hearing that “if our customers don’t like [our service] they will go somewhere else.” Like what, the movies?
There are a lot of famous anecdotes about our 36th president, and a strange number of them involve the bathroom. In one, a female reporter is trying to get Johnson to answer some questions, and Johnson agrees on the condition that she hold his pecker while he pee; in another, he goes to relieve himself in the middle of a meeting and has the other person follow him, continuing to talk whilst emptying his bowels. So when Wall Street Journal scribe Ethan Smith starts off a profile of artist manager and Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff with a scene of him and a subordinate working in “his spacious Beverly Hills bathroom,” you can guess what he’s trying to do.
So after a New Jersey Congressman fired off a missive to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division regarding Ticketmaster’s policy of dumping users to its sister reselling site, TicketsNow, once tickets to Bruce Springsteen‘s shows in the Northeast sold out, Springsteen and his manager got in on the open-letter act, too, going so far as to use the verbs “abuse” and “condemn” in regard to the sorta-scammy practice while also getting salty about the ticketing behemoth’s proposed merger with concert-promotion heavyweight Live Nation. Oh snap!
One of the strangest narratives surrounding Sunday’s release of Chinese Democracy is that the music itself is something of a non-event, thanks to the circulation of live nu-GNR bootlegs and leaks of in-progress tracks. In fact, enough questions have been answered about how Chinese Democracy sounds that a bigger question looms: Why now? Why, out of all the dates on the calendar, would Axl Rose decide that November 2008 felt like a good time to drop an album?
The good news: Ticketmaster is experimenting with dropping the “convenience fees” that can potentially mark up the tickets it sells as much as 75%. The bad news: This experiment, right now, is restricted to fans of the freaking Eagles, thanks in part to the deal two weeks ago that brought the ticketing behemoth together with Irving Azoff’s Frontline Management. Which just happens to manage Don Henley & Co.
In a move that’s part and parcel with the continued “verticalization” of the music industry, the Ticketmaster is buying a controlling interest in Irving Azoff’s Frontline Management, which counts Christina Aguilera, The Eagles, Neil Diamond, and, oh yeah, Guns N’ Roses, among its clients. Azoff will continue on as manager of these acts. The move is a push-back against the growing management/promoter/ticket vendor chimera that is Live Nation–if Live Nation can get into the ticket-selling game and the ill-advised 360-deal game, the logic seems to say, well then so can Ticketmaster get into the management game. Seeing as how today has been “all GNR all the time” around here, I have a theory as to the timing of this move.
Billboard group editorial director Tamara Conniff is leaving the magazine to take a position with Front Line Management, which is run by music industry heavyweight Irving Azoff and which counts the Eagles and New Kids On The Block on its roster. More »
Billboard group editorial director Tamara Conniff is leaving the magazine to take a position with Front Line Management, which is run by music industry heavyweight Irving Azoff and which counts the Eagles and New Kids On The Block on its roster. More »
