perform in the buildings we had original booked, a real piece of skill” (Waddell, “U2 Set To”).
One ponders if these obstacles could have been overcome by a smaller concert promoter with
significantly less global influence.
Marketing, the Ticket Seller, and Ticket-Selling
As established earlier, Live Nation’s influence and clout in the concert industry market is
unparalleled. The main job of a concert promoter is to promote the concert and sell tickets
(Barnet, Berry, Waddell, 113). When it comes to these aspects of touring, Live Nation was
founded on its ability to market concerts and convert those performances into cash. Even
though the firm has an impressive track record with its concert efforts, the task of executing a
world tour, especially one of the immensity of the 360 tour is a challenge.
As many influential promoters and music-industry professionals will tell you, marketing
a single concert has many components within a single marketing plan: market research,
announcement date, on-sale date, press, sponsorship, complimentary tickets, etc. Larry Vallon,
Senior Vice President of National Booking for AEG Live, says that marketing a show depends by
genre and audience, while owner of The Roxy Theater in Los Angeles, Nic Adler, adds that the
type of venue determines the artists that are booked and the corresponding marketing plan,
and Brad Wavra, the Vice President of Touring at Live Nation, says that making sense of all of
the data available on the internet about music-listeners is the key to creating successful shows
(ArtistHouseMusic.com). These are only a few of the factors that make up the marketing of a
live show. If you multiply these responsibilities by the 110 concert dates on the 360 tour, this
becomes an increasingly daunting task. As the aforementioned statements by Arthur Fogel
suggest, a tour the size of the 360 tour could not possibly be coordinated by independent
promoters to the degree needed to sell out every date. With Live Nation at the helm, there is
the potential for coordinated branding, ticket prices, announcement and on-sale dates,