Has Live Nation made its last Irish deal?
It has been a busy week for live music giants Live Nation in Ireland and abroad.
While Live Nation’s solo Irish gig to date has been the management of the Point venue in Dublin, their influence on the domestic scene is set to increase.
Venue owner Harry Crosbie announced in an interview with this paper last week that Live Nation will look after all his venues, including Vicar Street and mooted new venues Vicar Street 2 and the Grand Canal Square theatre.
However, this may not be the last move by Live Nation in the Irish live music market this year.
The company’s long-standing global policy has been to buy out successful promoters and live venue operators in profitable territories, so it stands to reason that the company may well be considering a similar acquisition here.
Live Nation would not have to look far for an ideal fit as they already have a significant working relationship with promoter Denis Desmond. The MCD boss established investment vehicle Hamsard with Live Nation to acquire the Mean Fiddler business, now rebranded as Festival Republic, in the UK.
Further afield, there was confirmation of the company’s partnership deal with Madonna.
The 10 year deal, worth a reputed $120 million, will cover all of the artist’s future music and music-related business ventures including touring, merchandising, websites and sponsorship agreements.
It will be interesting to see how future Madonna releases will perform, especially given the slide in quality in this department in recent years.
Either way, we can look forward to seeing Madonna on a stage for many years to come, which is good news for her former label Warner Music, as they still control the back catalogue.
Live Nation have now established the Artist Nation division as an one-stop shop to oversee the activities of acts like Madonna.
Such a move means the company are now very much in the business of signing acts.
However, they’re likely to concentrate on those heritage acts with established fanbases coming to the end of their current major label contracts rather than sign loads of new bands.
As new acts will quickly discover in the coming years, it is the major labels and the major labels alone who have historically invested seed capital in untried and untested acts.
An expensive way to stand out from the mainstream masses
9:32 am
Is this going to be good news for new acts? With the majors losing more and more of the heritage acts will they go searching for and pushing other new and less established acts (even ones that they already have on the roster that get lost in the shuffle whenever a new Coldplay album coincides with theirs). Or will the fact that they’ve lost their proven earners mean that in order to shore up finances they’ll wind up taking a punt on fewer and fewer acts?
I wonder what’s more attractive to out of contract artists when it comes to future releases, doing things the In Rainbows way or taking the all in one deal.
Comment by Ian