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  1. Could be interesting for the UK members...

    Live Nation, the concert promoter behind Madonna and Jay-Z, has reappointed Sold Out Advertising to handle its £10m UK media planning and buying account.

    The agency pitched with OMD Group to win the business in a pitch against Carat, Starcom and MindShare. Sold Out, a full-service agency working across arts and entertainment industry, has an informal arrangement with OMD on international and large-scale clients.

    Live Nation, which also manages venues and events including Wembley Arena, T in the Park and the Reading and Leeds Festivals, called a review of its media planning and buying arrangements in June.

    The review was called as Live Nation looked to expand the media brief. It spent £4m on paid-for media in the UK during the 12 months to April, but is understood to be more than doubling its budget.

    It follows a series of high profile deals as Live Nation, formerly part of Clear Channel, attempts to expand its offering. In October 2007 it announced a new contract with Madonna, replacing Warner Music as her record label as well as handling her tours and concerts.

    Live Nation has also signed deals with U2, Shakira and Nickelback.

    The music company is also understood to be launching a ticketing service in 2009. The speculation comes as its deal to sell tickets through Ticketmaster expires next year.

    At the time of calling the pitch, a spokesman for the company said the account would cover the UK, but could potentially be expanded to other European markets at a later date.
  2. From today's Variety......not sure if/how it impacts U2

    Originally posted by Variety
    Live Nation punches ticket pact
    Company makes deal with SMG's venues
    By PHIL GALLO


    Live Nation has inked the first significant client for its ticketing service, inking the venue management company SMC for seven years beginning in late 2009.

    Agreement gives Live Nation Ticketing the exclusive right to sell tickets as SMG's venues as their current ticket agreements expire. Pact is expected to be completely in place by 2011.

    SMG provides management services to 75 arenas, nine stadiums, 52 performing arts centers and 66 convention centers. Among its venues are Soldier Field in Chicago and the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

    The concert company's ticketing service starts operating on Jan. 1 and is expected to handle more than 10 million tickets for Live Nation venues alone. Live Nation anticipates that the SMG deal will eventually boost its ticket totals by 25%.

    SMG president Wes Westley said in a statement the alliance "will enhance our ability to drive content to our venues while combining technology and distribution to help our clients maximize attendance and build their business."

    Live Nation has touted its ticketing service as a crucial link between its concert promoters and the fans, which led to it not renewing it contract with Ticketmaster that expires at the end of the year.
  3. From the Irish Independent. 3 tours. . ..

    U2 will still be rocking and coining it when they approach their 60s, after the fine print of their lucrative new deal was revealed this week.

    Recession may be the buzzword of the year, but not in U2’s world. The band’s ability to command top dollar seems to be as strong as it always was.

    And this week, while students and pensioners took to the streets to protest over a divisive Budget, details of U2’s most recent deal were coming to light.

    It was revealed that Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr had received shares totalling €19m as part of their deal with US entertainment giant Live Nation, which was signed amid much industry gossip in March.

    The up-front payment — made public after being reported to US regulator Security and Exchange Commission — is effectively a sweetener for signing up to Live Nation’s new model order, and a telling illustration of how crucial the Dublin four-piece is for the US corporation.

    It also showcases the unstinting appeal of the U2 brand. After all, the 12-year deal signed with Live Nation is dependent on them being a going concern right up to their late 50s and being able to stay relevant in shifting music climates.

    U2, all in their mid-40s now, are expected to play three hugely lucrative tours during the duration of the dozen-year deal. Based on their live outings to date, the band should comfortably pull in over $1bn from touring alone, as well as hundreds of million dollars more on merchandising. Both the band and Live Nation will share a sizeable chunk of all the money earned.

    Unlike Madonna and Jay-Z — who both signed big-money deals with Live Nation this summer — U2 will retain control over their studio recordings. They enjoy an existing deal with Universal — the biggest of the four record company ‘majors’ — and their forthcoming 12th album, tentatively titled No Line On The Horizon, will yield the band a rumoured 28pc royalty for each copy sold.

    It’s a royalty rate that’s one of the best in the business and one that the band has enjoyed since the mid-Eighties. When one considers that each studio album shifts in the region of 10 million copies — maintaining their position of, in Bono’s words, “the biggest band in the world” — those 28pcs really add up.

    U2’s decision to move part of its financial empire to Holland to minimise the tax they pay on the publishing side of their business continues to be criticised. In 2006, the group began moving some of their business affairs to a Dutch finance house in order to avail of a virtually tax-free status on their handsome royalties.

    They are believed to have saved around €15m by transferring the music publishing side of their business empire to Amsterdam — a relatively paltry sum given their estimated joint wealth of €690m.

    “The reality is that U2’s business is 90pc conducted around the world,” manager Paul McGuinness said at the time. “Ninety per cent of our tickets and 98pc of our records are sold outside of Ireland. It [Ireland] is where we live and where we work and where we employ a lot of people. But we pay taxes all over the world. And like any other business, we’re perfectly entitled to minimise the tax we pay.”

    McGuinness — the band’s manager of over 30 years — is seen as the the primary architect of U2’s enormous wealth. Famously, the band divides all earnings in five equal portions, with McGuinness bagging as much as Bono.

    Although he holds no business qualifications, McGuinness has been instrumental in managing their finances from day one.

    His first role in rock management was looking after the long-forgotten trad-rock band Spud, but when he happened upon U2 he found something he liked in the then rough-and-ready band.

    When he first started managing the group, they were still at school and legend has it that he kept the coins for their bus fares in a glass jar, only doling out the amount they required.

    While debut album Boy helped put the band on the map, it was McGuinness who pushed them to tour the US — an often crippling expense for fledgling Irish bands, but one which helped foster a mutual love affair between the group and America.

    And it was McGuinness who helped restore confidence in a band racked with insecurity after second album October was generally badly received. They re-grouped and hit the big time with its anthemic follow-up, War.

    While the temptation must have existed early on to cash in there and then and sell the rights of the band’s songs to the record company, he held firm. Others, such as Paul McCartney, sold the rights to their entire catalogue only to rue the decision shortly afterwards.

    It was this intransigence and unshakable belief in U2’s worth that helped McGuinness to negotiate their high royalty rate with Island Records — one of the most lucrative in music history.

    McGuinness also conducted the groundbreaking deal with Apple four years ago, which resulted in the U2 iPod, emblazoned with the key colours of their last album, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, as well as helping to make Apple’s iTunes the big success it is today by making 400 of their songs available — a resounding endorsement to the legal download site.

    When U2 signed with Live Nation, McGuinness explained the band’s rationale: “There’s a certain convergence taking place in the industry, and it’s obvious that the biggest part of U2’s business now is their live business, even though they’re a major, major record-selling act.”

    The band’s relationship with Live Nation has been mutually beneficial. McGuinness says: “For some time now, they’ve been executing, promoting and producing our tours as partners pretty well perfectly. Since they want to consolidate rights and they have an online vision that I believe in, their Ticketmaster deal is expiring, which is going to change their margin, I’m very happy to go into a partnership with them.

    And, apart from all the financial stuff, there is a real friendship, a real bond.”

    That bond is wholly understandable when one considers that U2’s 18-month Vertigo tour between 2005 and 2007 took in close to €400m, making it the second-highest grossing tour of all time (behind the Rolling Stones).

    The length of the deal, which exceeds even Madonna’s 10-year pact, “indeed is a mark of the faith and trust we have in them”, according to McGuinness. “In 12 years’ time, U2 will not even be the age the Rolling Stones are now.”

    Unlike Mick Jagger and friends, U2 will be hoping to continue to generate excitement about each new album released rather than rest on a greatest hits routine.

    Few bands of their vintage continue to arouse such fascination on the music front and there is building anticipation for No Line On The Horizon, which will be released earlier next year rather than in November as had been originally thought.

    After flirting with dance music and electronica in the Nineties, U2 this decade have returned, to some extent, to their roots with a harder, rock-oriented sound. Various members of the ‘U2 family’ have been making encouraging noises of late — including long-term producer Daniel Lanois, who recently described it as “one of the great, innovative records from U2″.

    Universal — and Interscope, its subsidiary that U2 now call home — will be hoping that it can follow the successes of the two other albums that the band have released this decade, 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.

    Meanwhile, Bono was in the news this week for reasons closer to home. He and his wife Ali have applied to Dun Laoghaire/ Rathdown Co Council to add an extension to their Killiney mansion to provide them with a massive master bedroom, two ensuite bathrooms, walk-in dressing rooms and a study.

    Although none of the members lives the sort of ostentatious lifestyle enjoyed by Elton John, for instance, they are not exactly scrimping it either.

    With homes in Killiney (valued at about €10m) and a villa in the south of France, Bono also spends time in his enormous triplex penthouse apartment in Manhattan.

    The Edge divides his time between Dalkey, Co Dublin, a waterside mansion in Malibu, California, and a French villa.

    Adam Clayton owns a 20-room pile in Rathfarnham, south Dublin, while Larry Mullen Jr has a pair of large houses in Howth on Dublin’s northside.


  4. No real base for that, though. They only did their maths: 12 years deal, band released album/toured every 4 years in the past = 3 tours...

    Let's hope they're wrong.
  5. Originally posted by yeah:[..]

    No real base for that, though. They only did their maths: 12 years deal, band released album/toured every 4 years in the past = 3 tours...

    Let's hope they're wrong.


    Why? I thought 3 more tours would be great
  6. Originally posted by yeah:[..]

    No real base for that, though. They only did their maths: 12 years deal, band released album/toured every 4 years in the past = 3 tours...

    Let's hope they're wrong.


    the '. . . . . . . . . ' opened it for discussion. I'd definitely say 3 tours. Nice little earner either way


  7. I hope they quit after the new album/tour. But that's just me and another topic...


  8. not with this deal


  9. Please no. They're still going strong. And as you want it, they have to stop in 2-3 years


  10. yep, seems so.

    Nice article, btw. Love the Stones bashing and McG's justification for the tax move.
  11. Originally posted by yeah:[..]

    yep, seems so.

    Nice article, btw. Love the Stones bashing and McG's justification for the tax move.



    who knows? The boys might surprise you.

    I thought the tax justification was kinda fair enough, business is business and they are all greedy bastards so. . .
  12. Originally posted by germcevoy:[..]

    who knows? The boys might surprise you.

    I thought the tax justification was kinda fair enough, business is business and they are all greedy bastards so. . .


    The justification is perfectly okay and it's more than understandable to pay as little taxes as possible.

    But there also is this lead singer who preaches that 1st world countries should increase their donations for Africa. Now how do countries generate their income? Bingo- taxes.