MUSIC|MEDIA|DESIGN

Or rather, “someone”.  LiveNation and Ticketmaster have hired Hillary Rosen to pimp their monopoly in Congress. In case you forgot, Rosen presided over the RIAA during the Napster fiasco, spewing one absurd position after another. She left her term as RIAA President Bush-style: after being hired to lead an industry at it’s peak, she presided over a dramatic (even historic) decline, leaving the music business a smoking ruin, universally hated by it’s customers. Heckuva job, Hill!

If past results indicated future performance, this would be great news. But hiring Hillary, a proven failure, is similar to re-electing George W. Bush to fix the economy.  Unfortunately, Rosen was only unsuccessful from the perspective of share prices and industry profits.  In her role as fearmonger-in-chief, she succeeded fabulously though.  She managed to convince every major label executive that the sky was falling.  She painted the most successful new product in the history of music (iTunes and Amazon downloads) as malignant parasites, and slowed their adoption and eventual success.  An honest economic evaluation would reveal her efforts cost the industry far more than their reactionary claims of piracy losses (of course both arguments are imaginary – we cannot know how much of what was stolen would have been sold, any more than we can know how many purchases might have been made if a functioning market had been allowed to exist).

The bottom line is simple: A merger of LiveNation and Ticketmaster is not good for any independent artist.  After completed, even the biggest stars will be vassals to Hillary’s new masters.  Rates for all players will be set according to LiveNation’s needs.  Big shows will cease to be a market, and become more like major league sporting events.  Venues won’t be able to sell tickets if they dare an end-run around LiveNation’s booking.  Artists will lose control over ticket prices and venue relationships they’ve established.  There really are no upsides to this.  The appearance of Hillary Rosen smells bad.

Clear Channel is not about music.  They’ve cut music programming, and treat it as a broad, generic market, like TV networks once treated programming before cable.  It’s a move in the wrong direction. Worse, Clear Channel has used their monopolies in local radio market to influence the politics and culture in those markets.  The culture they advance is right wing, loud-mouthed and obnoxious, voiced by clowns like Bill Cunningham (an embarrassment to rationality).  It views music as a nice-to-have, and considers taste a maleable profit center.  They’ve shrunk the size of radio station staffs, while shrinking their reach and audiences.  If they do to music what they’ve done to radio, things can get much worse.

Folks, this is a tough slog.  Historically it looks like we’re going to lose.  It’s been 100 years since an administration actually blocked a deal like this!  But this is so terrible, so clearly wrong, and there are so many examples of the problems with it, there’s some hope.  Both companies are slimy, and the ideas they’re pushing have repeatedly failed or made bad situations worse.  Still, if no one hears us scream in agony over this wound, we’re all doomed.

So write your Congressman and Senator.  Write President Obama: many of his supporters are Clear Channel/Rosen cronies, so if he doesn’t hear the other side, you can bet they’ll get their way.