Live Nation's Michael Rapino:
Quote:
At the core, we’re closer to a travel company than we are to a record label.
ON 360 DEALS (AND THAT TIME THEY ADDED ALBUM DEALS TO THE MIX):
It's an insurance policy for the band. That motive to us is the best. We're fully vested, we've got sponsorship, we're trying to bring deals to the table to build the pot. At that point, what happened is, when we started talking to the U2's and the Madonna's about this kind of deal, they'd say ‘geez, to buy my rights to touring for ten years, that's 85 percent of my value… why don't I just throw the record on top of that. It's almost like a cherry on top of the… We didn't wake up thinking we wanna be a record label but we went, ‘I get it,' because that's their leverage, so let's do it. Now, we didn't do it with U2, which was smart — we just stayed to our knitting. Madonna, we ended up taking the cherry.
ON WHY IT DIDN’T WORK:
"We're not in the rights business. Back then we didn't have any secret sauce on how to distribute that record than somebody else. That's why we thus sold Shakira and Madonna back to the label to recoup our record investment."
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Source:
http://www.billboard.com/articles/bu...ling-360-deals
Listen to the full interview here:
http://www.recode.net/2016/5/26/1171...een-disneyland
So this is where it all went wrong ... He's admitting they have no idea on how to be a record label, how to move their records, etc.
Shakira went from being a decent selling recording artist to struggling with her album.
Madonna went from being one of the biggest, brightest, most relevant pop artists of all time to struggling to hit 1 million records or entering the UK Top 20 or *insert other chart achievement here* after she signed with LiveNation.
But let's not blame anyone else really. It's not LiveNation's fault. The artists (and their managements) made a bad business call.
