The Wall Street Journal reports that Ticketmaster and Live Nation are close to a merger:

The combined company would be called Live Nation Ticketmaster [How clever! – ed.], and would merge the world’s biggest concert promoter with the world’s dominant ticketing and artist-management company. The resulting firm would be able to manage everything from recorded music to ticket sales and tour sponsorship. It could package artists in new ways, for example, allowing corporations such as a cellphone provider to sponsor a concert tour and to sell an exclusive download of a song.

Because it would be so vertically integrated, the new company would also be able to muscle out competing concert promoters and have more power to dictate ticket prices to consumers.

What effect do you think this will have on you? Any chance this will do any good for anybody? I’ve consciously avoided Ticketmaster for years, so I could really give a shit.

Live Nation was spun off from Clear Channel back in 2005. Remember Clear Channel? Boy, back in the day, they were Enemy #1. Those were the days when we had the audacity to hope that commercial radio might one day become listenable. Before iPods. Does anybody even care about Clear Channel anymore? Seems almost quaint now.