The concert industry lags dramatically behind the great hospitality businesses out there, whether they're theme parks or hotels or sporting events.
Rihanna can sell just as many tickets in Cape Town as she can in Detroit.
Jay Z is one of the world's preeminent touring artists.
In our business we don't mind if a price of a ticket goes down; our job is to get as many bums in seats as possible.
Our job is to build a company for the future that can meet the demands of the artist and fan of the future.
A promoter needs to be in the e-commerce ticketing business. In a fundamental sense the promoter's job is to buy a show and go and market and sell the tickets.
Everyone loves to criticize Ticketmaster, but the real asset of Ticketmaster is that it's the third-largest e-commerce site in America.
The history of the ticketing business was about barriers to entry, which kept Ticketmaster protected. That has changed.
When a fan buys a ticket, we learn an enormous amount about them: What bands they like, where they live, how much they are willing to spend. Someday, a fan will be sitting in a bar and his cellphone will text message 'Sonic Youth are playing tonight. Do you want to go?' He'll buy his ticket over the phone and walk to the concert.
In my business, the cheaper the ticket price the better. I'd love for more consumers to walk into an amphitheater, park, have a beer and eat a hot dog. There's no advantage to me to have anything but sold-out shows.
To be a great concert marketer, we are shifting our focus from traditional media to online and mobile as direct ways to reach consumers.
My kids, my health and my job are all equally important.
Hosting over 35,000 concerts and festivals each year, Live Nation has the opportunity and responsibility to provide our artists and fans with a live music experience that protects our planet. The adverse effects of climate change are undeniable, and we want to use our place on the world stage to be part of the solution.
EDM is here to stay. If you're 19 years old, this is your rock 'n' roll.
As an industry, YouTube and digital content have a huge upside to creation and virally reach fans, and there's a multi-billion dollar business of advertising attached to that.
Vice has done a great job at talking to millennials.
Part of calling ourselves Live Nation was about starting to shift the way we think, to be first and foremost fan-focused.
The touring business is obviously critical to selling records, building fan bases, selling T-shirts, fulfilling sponsorship commitments.
Madonna would not have done a 360 deal with us just because of our touring capability. We had to prove to her and others that we have been working on and built a very good execution capacity at Artist Nation.
Going into 2010, we didn't expect the consumer pullback that happened. We all thought that the theory that concerts are recession-proof was true.
