Last month, Ticketmaster settled a $400 million class action lawsuit over its exorbitant fees. This month, they’re paying it out—in the form of discount codes and vouchers. Chances are, you have a free show or two sitting in your inbox.
Comedian Louis C.K. just single-handedly proved that you don't need Ticketmaster and their inscrutable "convenience" charges to make a killing in ticket sales.
The terrible and anticompetitive Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger got the OK from the Justice Department, so prepare to pay $200 in "service fees" for every ticket to anything you buy ever again.
• Rupert Murdoch and John Malone are "interested" in a deal with NBC Universal, but have yet to pick up the phone and do anything about it. [THR]
• Condé Nast cut sales staff at W and Vanity Fair today and proved that no one is safe by dismissing the wife of a Newhouse family member. Some good news: magazines are…
• Ben Silverman didn't have much success during his two-year stint at NBC, but that didn't stop him from scoring a super-sweet deal with Barry Diller's IAC. His new venture will reportedly give him $100 million to play with. [NYP]
• Viacom, the media conglomerate controlled by batty billionaire Sumner Redstone,…
• HarperCollins announced layoffs and a major reorg today. [NYO, Gawker]
• No one wants to take the editor job at OK! [Page Six]
• Ron Burkle's magazine distribution company is suing a bunch of publishing companies for trying to drive it out of business. We should be so lucky. [NYP]
• Michael Kinsley explains why…
• More magazine closures may be on the way at Condé Nast. [NYO]
• Time Warner posted a fourth-quarter loss of $16 billion. [AP]
• Bill Keller says there are "deadly serious" discussions taking place at the New York Times about charging for access to the paper's website. [E&P]
• Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has…
The layoffs are moving up the food chain, from the startups to the larger tech beasts. FuckedStartups writes that Ticketmaster is laying off 35 percent of its 3,000-plus staff, which squares with other reports I've heard. Ticketmaster is besieged with competition from concert promoter LiveNation, and was recently spun…
In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone…
There's one person apart from shareholder John Malone who stands to lose when IAC is broken up: Alex von Furstenberg, adopted son of the internet conglomerate's boss, Barry Diller. The shaved-headed socialite, Diane von Furstenberg's son by her first gay husband, will still inherit a large part of his adoring…
What if Facebook let you properly express your rage against the tool who just added you to the "Buying and Selling Friends" app? What if Netflix knew you'd skip to the dirty bits? I paid Jay Hathaway a slave's wage to draw up what this would look like.
Ticketmaster, the event-ticket retailer whose monopolies on venues and exorbitant fees are legendarily evil, has somehow garnered nearly 157,000 fans on Facebook. And by "somehow" I mean "created thousands upon thousands of fake accounts." At least that's according to the East Village Idiot, who did some digging and…
IAC's Ticketmaster division is trying to close a multiyear deal to be the official ticket scalper of the National Football League. TicketMaster competitor and eBay subsidiary StubHub is the other potential bidder for resale rights. Earlier this year, Stubhub made a deal to resell Major League Baseball tickets, a…
Apple and Ticketmaster have hooked up for a new promotion. Buyers of concert tickets can get the matching artist's album from the iTunes store for $1 off. Ticketmaster had already offered iTunes affiliate links on its site, which passes a kickback to Ticketmaster for any resulting sales. Additionally, a gift-card…
By our count, Ticketmaster's upcoming spinoff from IAC will be the seventh time Barry Diller has bought or sold a piece of the online-ticketing agency, starting from the first stake he acquired in it a decade ago. After the jump, a chronology of Diller's Ticketmaster deals.
More and more artists are striking innovative deals to sell their music — and leaving the traditional record industry contract behind. The Wall Street Journal reports that once Madonna's contract with Warner Music is up, she will link up with concert-promoter Live Nation. While not as revolutionary as Radiohead's …
