By Jim McCarthy Feb 10, 2009 0 comments

Bye, Bye, Ticketmaster?

That’s a mild exaggeration, but as the boards of both companies have approved their merger, the company is going to go by the name Live Nation Entertainment.

I’m guessing the ticketing portion of the business will still be known as Ticketmaster, so yes, my headline was for dramatic purposes only.

You might have read that the company was going to be called Live Nation Ticketmaster, but that’s gone by the wayside.

From a marketing point of view, Live Nation is a much better name.  It puts the Live experience front and center and properly recognizes that the ticket is just a by-product of wanting to see the show.

Apparently, the regulatory barriers are bigger than I originally guessed.  The reason for it is that during the Springsteen on-sale last week, fans claim to have been sent to the Ticketsnow.com site when inventory was still available.  Ticketmaster says that that’s not the case, but has taken steps to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t confuse customers again.  Anyway, Bruce Springsteen got annoyed by the whole thing and now it’s become political.

Still, Ticketmaster has come through antitrust proceedings before, as recently as 2005.  In the last few years, Ticketmaster’s power over the industry has been in relative decline.  We’ll see what happens, and it’ll probably take as much as 9 to 12 months, but given the precedents, I would bet on this surviving antitrust review.

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