Irving Azoff and his Front Line Management company has been acquired by Ticketmaster and Azoff, deemed to be the most powerful man in the music industry, will head the combined company as the new CEO.
The deal was reported today in the Wall Street Journal.Ticketmaster will acquire Front Line Management and with it, artists including the Eagles, Neil Diamond, Christina Aguilera and Jimmy Buffett.
This brings the Ticketmaster business into alignment with its all powerful nemesis Live Nation.
Live Nation has been acquiring artists and purchased the businesses of Madonna, U2, Nickelback and Jay-Z into its model.
The combination of ticketing and artist management, combined with the ability to produce the music of the artists and bypass the major record labels has become the known as the 360 deal.
Instead of an artist signing to a label for recording, a publisher for songwriting, a touring company for touring and a merchandising company for products, it is becoming more common to sign to the one-stop 360 degree shop.
Live Nation accelerated the model after paying more than a billion dollars signing the acts. While it was originally seen as a major threat to the major labels, it quickly became a bigger threat to companies such as Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster has evened the score with the Azoff purchase and in doing so has probably weakened the major music labels one little bit more.
The irony is that to do the deal, Ticketmaster had to acquire the stake in Front Line Management via Warner Music which owned a 30% stake in the company.
The WSJ reports that Azoff will end up owning around 4.5% of Ticketmaster after the deal and a minority but sizeable shareholding in Front Line Management.
The news comes less than 24 hours after Ticketmaster announced that it was laying off 5% of its workforce globally.
The deal still needs due diligence as well as the sign-off of 10% Front Line shareholder Cablevision Systems Corp.
The CEO of Cablevision is James Dolan. Dolan also has his own band, JD & the Straight Shot.
JD & The Straight Shot is managed by ... (drum roll please) ... Irving Azoff.
