Touring
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In a week when everybody seems to be talking about touring, Post Malone pulled off his biggest feat yet: wrapping his 39-date Twelve Carat Tour with four sold-out shows in Los Angeles, the most he’s done in the city in his career. The run marked his return to touring, after a pandemic pause, and featured the hitmaker re-connecting with a fan base that has only grown with the release of his latest album, Twelve Carat Toothache, which he released this year.
Across the first 33 shows of the tour that were reported to Billboard Boxscore, Post moved 413,000 tickets between Sept. 10 and Nov. 6, bringing in $59.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore — with the L.A. dates not even factored into those totals as yet. And it helps Post’s agent, UTA partner Cheryl Paglierani, earn the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week.
Here, Paglierani — who also reps clients like Dominic Fike, who played the Palladium this week, and Flo Milli, who just wrapped her own tour at The Roxy — speaks about booking the Post Malone tour, the challenges caused by the pandemic and the return to live music, and the differences in booking an artist as their career grows from the club level to arena headliner. “We’ve seen a lot of success by not skipping any steps and staying focused on consistent growth with each tour,” she says.
This week, Post Malone wrapped his Twelve Carat Tour with four sold out shows in L.A., after having sold 413,000 tickets across the tour’s first 33 dates. What key decisions did you make to help make that happen?
It’s always a team effort amongst myself, his managers Dre London and Austin Rosen, and our tour promoter Colin Lewis. Each tour starts with mapping out the markets we want to play and then building out a strategy that allows us to hit all the major cities while also making sure we’re able to weave in smaller markets we may not play as often. Post already has such a massive fanbase, but the goal is to always continue expanding and make sure that we’re reaching more people each time than we have in the past. On the last tour, we did two nights in L.A. and New York and now we are doing four. We’ve seen a lot of success by not skipping any steps and staying focused on consistent growth with each tour.
This was Post’s first tour since the pandemic. How did you want to re-introduce him to audiences with this tour?
Post is an artist who needs no introduction. This tour was more about a re-connection with the fans after three years of being out of the spotlight. He really stepped up the production and put his all into creating not just an incredible show visually, but an experience that fans will remember forever. The stage is set up with two GA pits that allow fans to get right up against the stage. During the entire show, he is dapping their hands, taking items from the crowd and truly engaging with them in a way I have never seen an artist do. When the show ends, he stays on stage for an extra 30 to 40 minutes signing autographs and taking pictures with fans as the venue is clearing out. It’s truly mind blowing to watch one of the biggest stars in the world show so much love to his fans and go above and beyond. I think it’s a big part of what differentiates him from other artists.
How has touring changed since the pandemic?
At first there were a lot of new hoops to jump through to follow vaccination policies and COVID regulations. We are starting to see a lot of regulations that were put in place post-pandemic get lifted and touring feels to be on its way back to normalcy. I can’t say there’s any one thing I could point to that is drastically different as a result of the pandemic.
What challenges are you facing with routing, pricing and venue selection these days that perhaps weren’t there in the past?
The biggest challenge has been avails and oversaturated markets. With so many artists looking to get back out on the road we saw so many tours going out during the same time periods. You always want to make sure your clients are playing the right venue and we would often encounter venues that had no avails for weeks, so routing became a lot more challenging. We are starting to see things level out a bit but I think it will take another 12 to 24 months to truly go back to normal.
How is booking an arena tour different from booking theater or club outings these days, as for some of your other clients?
The booking process is very similar but there are more intricacies to work through as an artist grows into larger rooms on the deal-making side. As the show grows, so does the production, the amount of crew that needs to be out on the road, and the amount of money being offered to the artist. There are more deal points that need to be negotiated than at the club level. Ticketing also becomes a lot more complex at the arena level where you’re scaling rooms at different price levels versus general admission clubs. Paying attention to the ticketing and how fans are buying is crucial to maximizing show grosses and needs to be done in real time. If you’re doing it right it can be very time-consuming but also greatly impact the amount of money the artist makes, and as agents it’s our job to ensure that we get the best deal for our clients.
Maybe Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei’s statement that Taylor Swift and promoter AEG “chose” to work with Ticketmaster for her calamitous onsale earlier this week should have come with an asterisk.
On Thursday (Nov. 17), Maffei attempted to correct criticisms about Ticketmaster and its owner Live Nation operating as a monopoly by pointing out that Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour “is not actually a Live Nation promoted concert” but rather “promoted by one of our largest competitors.”
Maffei — who is also the president of Live Nation’s largest shareholder Liberty Media — continued: “AEG who is the promoter for Taylor Swift, chose to use us because, in reality, we are the largest and most effective ticket seller in the world. Even our competitors want to come on our platform.”
The thing is, AEG says it’s essentially forced to work with Ticketmaster because of the stranglehold it has over the touring business. “Ticketmaster’s exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues on the Eras tour required us to ticket through their system,” an AEG spokesperson told Billboard in a statement. “We didn’t have a choice.”
The debacle centers around Swift’s presale Tuesday for her Eras Tour, which initially crashed shortly after launch as 14 million fans and billions of bots flooded the site, causing service disruptions. The ticket crash caught the attention of Capitol Hill. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, both of whom criticized the outage at Ticketmaster and doubled down on claims that the Live Nation-owned ticketing service was a monopoly. The Justice Department is now reportedly investigating Live Nation, though the investigation reportedly pre-dated the Swift debacle.
AEG and Live Nation have a complicated relationship built around intense competition and steady cooperation going back decades. While AEG’s facility group relies on Live Nation for programming, AEG Presents, the company’s concert promotion wing, competes directly against Live Nation’s global touring team and has its own preferred ticketing system, AXS.
While AEG Presents prefers to use AXS, their partner in the Eras Tour, Louis Messina (Messina Touring Group is a 50-50 joint venture between AEG and Messina), is basically agnostic when it comes to ticketing systems — he will work with any ticketing company, based on where the show takes place. In North America, that means working with Ticketmaster, which is especially dominant in the NFL as it provides tickets to 27 of the NFL’s 32 teams. By choosing to stage her show in NFL stadiums – really, in choosing to tour stadiums in the U.S. — Swift and her partners at AEG and Messina Touring Group are effectively forced to use Ticketmaster due to its supremacy in North America.
In that sense, Maffei’s argument that AEG chose to work with Ticketmaster is misleading, but it would also be inaccurate to describe Swift or AEG’s relationship with Ticketmaster as one built upon coercion. Historically, it’s been more mutually beneficial.
AEG’s venue management company ASM Global — formed following the merger of AEG Facilities and SMG in 2019 to become the biggest such company in the country — expanded its partnership with Live Nation in 2021, allowing the use of Ticketmaster for any of the shows the promoter brings to ASM’s 300 clients. In this arrangement, both sides win, since AEG relies on Live Nation to bring content to its buildings and grants the company incentives to entice shows to their facilities.
Swift has worked very closely with Ticketmaster over the years — for her Reputation stadium tour, the COVID-19-canceled Lovers Fest and now the Eras Tour, building an entire fan verification and Taylor Swift-branded ticketing platform together. While Swift might have preferred to have had more options to sell tickets to her fans, she did partner with the company in a way that few artists have in the past.
Perhaps Ticketmaster and Swift will mend their relationship once they start counting how much money they made together. Or maybe, they’re never, ever, ever, ever getting back together.
In light of fans — and Taylor Swift herself — taking issue with Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s highly publicized Verified Fan Presale failure, Jack Antonoff has a few choice words to share about the touring industry’s treatment of artists.
The Bleachers frontman and producer hit Twitter on Friday (Nov. 18) to blast music venues for taking away the revenue that newer artists have the potential to make from merchandise sales during concerts.
“While we are having the discussion can venues simply stop taxing merch of artists? This is literally the only way you make money when you start out touring,” he started. “The more we make it tenable for young and small artists to make a living on the road the more great music we will get. Touring is one of the most honest ways to make a living. Some of the hardest and most heartfelt work you can do. So why must [they] f— artist[s] so hard?”
The Grammy winning producer continued, “[Simple] solutions, stop taxing merch, stop lying to artists about costs of putting on shows, include artists in more areas of revenue. The stories I could tell from my years of touring are bananas. Young artists on tour are the last to see any money.”
Antonoff’s thread comes at what feels like a watershed moment for the music industry. Ticketmaster and Live Nation have come under fire from Antonoff’s frequent collaborator Taylor Swift, her fans and lawmakers after the disastrous sale of tickets for her 2023 The Eras tour.
The failure has led to the U.S. Department of Justice launching an investigation to see if the companies have abused its market shares in the music industry after 14 million fans attempted to access the presale, experienced major technical difficulties and failed to secure tickets, despite gaining entry into Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan Presale for the event. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift said in a note to fans.
Another one of Antonoff’s collaborators, Lorde, spoke about the harsh realities of touring in a newsletter post to fans, stating, “for pretty much every artist selling less tickets than I am, touring has become a demented struggle to break even or face debt.” According to the “Solar Power” singer, an increase in ticket prices could cover the heightened cost of touring, but “no one wants to charge their harried and extremely-compassionate-and-flexible audience any more f—ing money.”
Antonoff, with the rest of Bleachers, will complete the final dates of the band’s How Dare You Want Tour on Dec. 3-4 at the Zona Festival in Phoenix. The band are confirmed for two festival dates in 2023; the High Water Fest in North Charleston, S.C., on April 15 and the Adjacent Music Fest in Atlantic City, N.J. on May 27.
See Antonoff’s tweets below.
while we are having the discussion can venues simply stop taxing merch of artists? this is literally the only way you make money when you start out touring— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
the more we make it tenable for young and small artists to make a living on the road the more great music we will get— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
touring is one of the most honest ways to make a living. some of the hardest and most heartfelt work you can do. so why must fuck artist so hard?— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
simpel solutions, stop taxing merch, stop lying to artists about costs of putting on shows, include artists in more areas of revenue. the stories i could tell from my years touring are bananas. young artists on tour are the last to see any money.— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
Taylor Swift has spoken on the Ticketmaster fiasco, and it seems that she’s just as angry as her fans are. In a lengthy Friday (Nov. 18) message posted to her Instagram story, the 11-time Grammy winner shared that the mass outages and hours-long delays her fans experienced while trying to purchase tickets during her Eras Tour presale on Nov. 15 “pisses” her off.
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“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” she began in the statement. “We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.
“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” Swift continued. “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”
So many attempts — 14 million, to be exact — flooded Ticketmaster’s website on the day of the presale that the company’s site experienced major technical difficulties, causing some Swifties to walk away without securing a single ticket, even though they had previously been sent a special “Verified Fan” presale code by Ticketmaster. Hours later, the company posted a statement saying that it had been unprepared for the “historically unprecedented demand” Swifties exhibited that day, and postponed other Eras Tour onsales scheduled for that day.
Consumer response to the situation was so overwhelmingly negative, Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei appeared on CNBC to apologize to fans.
“It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift added in her note. “And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs.”
“Thank you for wanting to be there,” she concluded. “You have no idea how much that means.”
A rebound in the live music business helped German concert promoter CTS Eventim improve its revenues to 694.4 million euros in the third quarter ($699.3 million at the average exchange rate in the quarter), 84% higher than the same period in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced Thursday.
Revenue increased due to contributions from pre-sales, the staging of events and higher income from currency conversion. That was offset by a reduction in COVID-19 economic aide, received as compensation for event cancellations or events with reduced capacity, of 76.8 million euros ($77.3 million) from the prior-year period.
“These excellent results are testimony to the fact that our strategic initiatives are taking us from strength to strength following the post-pandemic restart of live entertainment,” said CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg in a statement. “Even in the face of new uncertainties caused by the high level of inflation and geopolitical factors, we will maintain this proven course in order to continue to drive our profitable growth, both at home and abroad.”
The live entertainment segment’s revenue was 563 million euros ($566.9 million) in the third quarter, up 103.6 from the same period in 2019, and 1.11 billion euros ($1.11 billion) in the nine-month period, a 42% improvement. Live entertainment EBITDA was 64 million euros ($64.4 million), about triple the amount in the same period of 2019.
The ticketing segment’s revenue improved to 137 million ($138 million) in the third quarter, up 28% from the same period in 2019, and to 339 million ($341.1 million) for the nine-month period, up 10.4% from 2019. CTS Eventim sold 17.2 million tickets in the quarter and 45.1 million tickets in the nine-month period, increases of 31% and 23%, respectively, from the pre-pandemic periods in 2019.
The company’s staff, including part-time workers, grew from 2,357 a year ago to 2,956 at the end of the third quarter.
The company sounded an alarm about rising costs stemming from higher personnel costs in security, catering and stage technology “induced by an increasing shortage of specialists in the event industry and at least temporarily higher demand due to the fact that both postponed and new events are currently being held at the same time,” it explained in its earnings release. The fourth-quarter results could be hampered by rising energy prices and a possible pullback of fan spending due to inflation’s impact on household purchasing power.
Still, CTS Eventim is going to have a record year in 2022. The company expects full-year revenue of 1.7 billion euros ($1.71 billion) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of 330 million euros ($332.3 million). That would represent gains of 17.8% and 16.2% over 2019, which was a record year for CTS Eventim. The company’s tenor improved from a quarter ago, when management was unable to provide a precise forecast for 2022 “owing to uncertainty about the pandemic and the geopolitical situation going forward.”
CTS Eventim shares fell 0.3% to 56.00 euros on Thursday. Year to date, the share price is down 13%.
How did Taylor Swift‘s 2023 Eras tour presale turn so calamitous? Ticketmaster service delays and website crashes outraged fans trying to buy tickets to the superstar’s 2023 tour this week, causing widespread outcry and condemnation for the ticket service as high up as Congress. And, finally, on Thursday (Nov. 17), company officials announced they had decided to cancel the general ticket sale scheduled for Friday — blaming a surge of unregistered fans and billions of bots for the failure.
Fans already bought up more than 90% of the ticketing inventory on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Ticketmaster, breaking the record Tuesday for the most tickets ever sold in a single day by a touring artist at 2 million. But with that success came catastrophe. More than 3.5 million fans registered for the chance to buy Swift tickets, and 1.5 million were invited to participate in Tuesday’s ticket sale for a crack at seats on the 52-date tour. Company officials say, however, it wasn’t pre-registered fans buying tickets who caused the crash on Tuesday, but that tens of millions of uninvited fans and billions of bots trying to access the sale early were to blame.
A Wednesday presale for Capital One card holders again brought a second unreported massive traffic of traffic to the site, as millions of fans — most without presale codes or an invitation — again tried to flood the presale meant only for a few hundred thousand card holders.
With little inventory left and even bigger crowds expected Friday, on Thursday Ticketmaster and Swift’s team decided to cancel the final onsale. It’s unclear how the remaining ticketing inventory will be distributed or sold. Meanwhile, the bad press has brought unwanted attention to the ticket giant.
Earlier Thursday, in an open letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, argued that “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services,” resulting in “dramatic service failures,” like the crash of Tuesday’s Taylor Swift sale.
Hours after the letter surfaced, Ticketmaster published a blog on its website offering an in-depth explanation of what caused the Swift presale to crash. Ticketmaster’s explanation for the crash — that it misjudged demand for presale tickets and was ill-prepared for the millions of fans that tried to log in — is not likely to satisfy Klobuchar and the bi-partisan criticism that the company is cutting corners due to it’s massive marketshare in the concert space.
According to Ticketmaster, about 3.5 million fans pre-registered for Taylor’s Verified Fan program — “the largest registration in history,” the company’s blog claims. The huge amount of demand “informed the artist team’s decision to add additional dates” to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour earlier this month, increasing the number of shows on sale from 26 to 52 stadium shows — 47 of which would be ticketed by Ticketmaster.
Despite doubling the number of shows that it was now selling tickets for, Ticketmaster didn’t increase the window of time it would need to process the large uptick in volume. That meant that instead of having 11 East Coast shows go on sale at the same time (10 a.m. EST), Ticketmaster was now putting 21 shows on sales at once.
Making matters worse, far more people showed up to buy tickets than was expected. On Monday night, the day before the presale, Ticketmaster sent out invitations to 1.5 million fans who had signed up for the presale with instruction on how to purchase tickets. “Historically, around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets,” according to Ticketmaster’s blog post, meaning Ticketmaster was only expecting about 600,000 people to actually try to log in. Not only did far more invitees show up, millions more uninvited guests tried to crash the party. Ticketmaster estimates that with uninvited guests and massive armies of bots, about 3.5 billion requests were made requesting access to the presale, causing the system to meltdown.
Company officials ended up having to do what they probably should have done in the first place — pushing back the remaining sales to give the Ticketmaster team more time to deal with the traffic issues and high demand. About 15% of fans attempting to buy Swift tickets experienced some type of disruption while trying to buy tickets or were unable to do so because of the site crash, according to the Ticketmaster blog. Still, the company did sell more than 2 million tickets that day — the most ever sold for a single artist in a day — and Ticketmaster has agreed to not allow Swift tickets to be sold on any of the secondary resale sites it controls, restricting markups to fans on its service.
Those hoping to snag tickets for Taylor Swift‘s 2023 Eras Tour during Friday’s public on-sale got some bad news on Thursday (Nov. 17), when Ticketmaster announced that it has since been canceled.
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“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled,” the ticketing service tweeted.
Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022
The cancellation is just the latest in a string of messy circumstances surrounding ticket sales for Swift’s highly anticipated tour. On Tuesday (Nov. 15), after an unprecedented number of fans went to Ticketmaster with presale codes in the hopes of buying tickets, Ticketmaster’s website experienced mass outages and extreme delays that caused some to wait for several hours in a virtual queue, just to walk away empty handed.
Ticketmaster then shared a statement shortly after 1 p.m. ET on Tuesday, about three hours after the East Coast venue presales began, noting that the company wasn’t prepared for the “historically” large demand for tickets, and postponed presales for West Coast venues and Capitol One cardholders scheduled for later that same day.
The wild demand for Eras Tour tickets had been apparent even leading up to the ticket sale, leading the “All Too Well” pop star to add 25 additional shows to her 27 original dates in the past couple weeks. Swift hasn’t hit the road since 2018, when she toured in support of her album, Reputation. She had planned to go out again after dropping 2019’s Lover for a series of stadium shows she dubbed Lover Fest, but the gigs were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Liberty Media CEO and Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei appeared on CNBC on Thursday morning (Nov. 17) to discuss the issues with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program that resulted in frustrated Taylor Swift fans queuing up for hours in an effort to score pre-sale tickets to the singer’s anticipated Eras Tour.
Ticketmaster Postpones Sales For Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras’ Tour Due to ‘Historically Unprecedented…
11/17/2022
“I apologize to all our fans. We are working hard on this,” Maffei told Squawk on the Street on Thursday morning (Nov. 17) about the company’s efforts to straighten out the situation that caused fan (and parent) consternation from coast-to-coast. “Building capacity for peak demand is something we attempt to do, but this exceeded every expectation.”
Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation — with Liberty holding a 30% ownership stake in the ticketing giant — has come under intense scrutiny this week for after the company’s website experienced mass outages and extreme delays that forced some to wait for hours in the virtual line, or just walk away empty-handed.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly. Its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved & they need to be reigned in. Break them up,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesday after the Swift tickets meltdown. Maffie told Squawk on the Street that the Live Nations team is “sympathetic that the long wait times and fans who couldn’t get what they wanted… reality is it’s a function of the massive demand that Taylor Swift has.”
Maffei explained that the pre-sale was supposed to be opened to 1.5 million Verified Swift fans for Tuesday’s on-sale, but instead 14 million Swifties attempted to log-in, including, he added, bots that were not supposed to be able to join the line. Despite the challenges and breakdowns, he said TM sold 2 million on Tuesday, a gaudy number that Maffei said could have filled 900 stadiums.
In a blog post, TM said that more than 3.5 million people pre-registered through Verified Fan for the Swift shows, the largest registration in the program’s history. It further explained that historically “around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets,” so working with Swift’s team around 1.5 million were invited to participate in the sale, with the remaining 2 million Verified Fans put on a waiting list.
Maffei also noted that the show is not promoted by LN — but by rival AEG Live and Messina Touring Group — so, “though AOC [a common nickname for Ocasio-Cortez] may not like every element of our business, AEG, our competitor who is the promoter for Taylor Swift, chose to use us because we are, in reality, the largest and most effective ticket seller in the world. Even our competitors want to come on our platform.”
Ticketmaster shared a statement shortly after 1 p.m. ET on Tuesday, about three hours after the East Coast venue presales began. It said that the company wasn’t prepared for the “historically unprecedented demand” for tickets, and postponed presales for West Coast venues and Capitol One cardholders scheduled for later that same day. Swift has announced 52 dates so far for the stadium tour that will mark her first major outing in five years.
AOC wasn’t the only member of congress to weigh in on the debacle. Connecticut Sen. Ricard Blumenthal tweeted, “Taylor Swift’s tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly. I’ve long urged DOJ to investigate the state of competition in the ticketing industry. Consumers deserve better than this anti-hero behavior.” In addition, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar agreed, writing on Wednesday, “What is going on with Ticketmaster is an example of why we need strong antitrust enforcement! Monopolies wreak havoc on consumers and our economy. When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”
Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged in 2010 to form Live Nation Entertainment, rolling together the nation’s largest concert promoter and ticketing agency. The move that was drew intense scrutiny at the time and in the wake of the Swift pre-sale fiasco, Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti said on Wednesday that his office will once again be looking into the company.
“There are no allegations at this time about any misconduct, but as the Attorney General, it’s my job to ensure that the consumer protection laws and antitrust laws in Tennessee are being honored,” Skrmetti told reporters, according to WJHL. Skrmetti said there have been “a number of complaints” lodged with his office about the pre-sale and that his team planned to look into the “severe” lack of customer support in what is the latest probe into possible antitrust allegations involving TM and LN conducted by Tennessee authorities.
Watch Maffei’s interview below.
John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp. said Thursday that its board of directors has authorized management to pursue a split-off of the Atlanta Braves and its associated real estate development project and the creation of a new Liberty Live Group tracking stock, which will house the company’s 31 percent stake in Live Nation Entertainment, among other things.
Tracking stocks are designed to let investors track specific businesses that are part of a larger company. Liberty has used such tracking stocks in the past in the hopes of highlighting the performance and value of parts of its wide-ranging portfolio of assets.
“We plan to split off the Atlanta Braves into an asset-backed stock to better highlight its strong value. Additionally, post-split-off, we plan to recapitalize all of Liberty Media’s remaining common stock into three tracking stock groups,” said Greg Maffei, Liberty Media president and CEO. “These actions will provide greater investor choice and enable targeted investment and capital-raising through more focused currencies, while maintaining an optimal capital structure for Liberty Media and preserving optionality with respect to our subsidiary SiriusXM and our Live Nation stake.”
The split-off will be accomplished “through the redemption of Liberty Media’s existing Liberty Braves common stock in exchange for common stock of a newly formed company to be called Atlanta Braves Holdings Inc.,” the firm said. “Atlanta Braves Holdings would hold all of the businesses, assets and liabilities currently attributed to the Braves Group, including Braves Holdings LLC, which is the direct or indirect owner and operator of the Atlanta Braves Major League Baseball Club, certain assets and liabilities associated with the Atlanta Braves’ stadium and mixed-use development project, The Battery Atlanta, and corporate cash.” In connection with the Split-Off, Liberty Media would redeem each outstanding share of its Series A, Series B and Series C Liberty Braves common stock for one share of the corresponding series of common stock of Atlanta Braves Holdings. As a result of the Split-Off, Liberty Media and Atlanta Braves Holdings would be separate publicly traded companies. It is expected that the intergroup interests in the Braves Group held by Liberty Media’s existing Liberty SiriusXM Group and Formula One Group would be settled and extinguished in connection with the Split-Off in a manner to be determined.”
Following the completion of the split-off, Liberty Media wants to create a new tracking stock group, the Liberty Live Group. It would then have three tracking stocks: the Liberty SiriusXM Group, Formula One Group and the Liberty Live Group. The company said the third one would include “its interest in Live Nation Entertainment Inc., corporate cash, certain public and private assets currently attributed to the Formula One Group, Liberty Media’s 0.50 percent Live Nation exchangeable senior debentures due 2050, margin loan obligations incurred by its wholly owned special purpose subsidiary, which are secured by shares of common stock of Live Nation Entertainment Inc., together with other assets as may be determined from time to time by Liberty Media.”
Liberty Media said it expects to complete the split-off and the tracking stock reclassification in the first half of 2023.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
If things had gone to plan, Anthrax would be back home by now basking in the glow of their first major European tour since 2019. But instead the group were forced to cancel 20 dates on their 40th anniversary Euro jaunt, instead playing just 8 gigs in the UK before packing things up.
“When I saw the numbers, they were literally triple what they originally started at,” bassist Frank Bello told TotalRock‘s Neil Jones about the scotched shows. “We would be coming home at such a loss. You don’t mind a little bit of a loss just to play to the fans, but such a loss — we would have been really bad off for a while. So it didn’t make sense.”
When Jones asked if it was a “Brexit thing” that forced the cancellations, Bello said, “it’s a human thing at this point, my God. I mean, it’s a budgetary thing.” Bello explained that the group were excited to play for their “great big” overseas fanbase, but once they did the budget before the shows went on sale things were totally upended by the global pandemic. “After COVID, when everything went crazy, money-wise, financially it wasn’t feasible to do it anymore,” he said.
“When [we] looked at it, we said, ‘All right. There’s better times ahead.’ And that’s the way to look at it now. Look, heating costs and everybody’s gotta put food on the table. I get it right now. So it’s just a really hard time for everybody.”
Bello said he can’t wait to return to Europe “the next time around,” but at this point no new dates have been announced for the run that was slated to run from Oct. 11-Nov. 5. Anthrax played a run of UK dates from Sept. 27-Oct. 8 after announcing on Aug. 31 that, “sadly due to ongoing logistical issues and 2022 costs that are out of our control, we have no other option but to cancel the European leg of our upcoming 2022 tour.”
Anthrax are a month a raft of acts who’ve opened up about the financial and logistical hardships of touring right now. Recently Lorde said things are “at an almost unprecedented level of difficulty” out there on the road, while earlier this year a number of smaller and medium-sized acts told Billboard that “out of control” gas prices were seriously eating into profit margins.
Watch Bello’s interview below.