Irving Azoff , CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment, and Michael Rapino, President and CEO of Live Nation, have been called to testify Tuesday, February 24, before the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee in relation to the proposed merger between their two companies.
Tuesday’s hearing is the first of two Congressional hearings scheduled for next week, the second being the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy hearing scheduled for Thursday, February 26.
In addition to Azoff and Rapino, Jerry Mickelson, Chairman and Executive Vice President of concert promotions giant JAM Productions, has also been called to testify, as well as David A. Balto, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Currently, no ticket brokers, venue operators or recording artists have been named as possible speakers, but it is unknown if the final list of speakers has been set. The list of the speakers for the House subcommittee meeting has not yet been released.
The proposed $2.5 billion merger has drawn intense scrutiny from politicians, financial analysts and all sides of the ticketing and live entertainment sectors, and the deal is currently the subject of a class action lawsuit from Ticketmaster shareholders to block it because they believe Ticketmaster is being undervalued.
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Dom should testify! He’s the only one out of the whole lot who has any balls!!
I hope they approach a member of the secondary ticket community to
testify in addition to Rapino and Azoff.
Not sure who would be an appropriate spokesman — Probably will be one
of these:
1) Chris Tsakalakis (Stubhub)
2) Gary Adler (NATB)
3) Don Vaccaro (Ticketnetwork)
4) Tom Patania (NATB)
5) Michael Hershfield (Wild Card –he did a tremendous job
articulating the ‘open market’ position on that BNN video and may be
the new face we are looking for…)