From today’s WSJ ($):

On Thursday, Ticketmaster, a division of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, begins trading as a standalone company—just as the ticketing giant faces one of its biggest challenges.

Ticketmaster’s largest client, Live Nation Inc., plans to launch its own ticketing business in January, after their current 10-year contract expires. Live Nation concerts last year represented 14% of Ticketmaster’s $1.2 billion in revenue, and Live Nation has made no secret of its desire to compete with Ticketmaster for other clients in the future.

Concert ticketing is a completely pointless business, made possible only by the unusual economics of live music; there’s no real competition for the consumer’s dollar when he or she wants to see a particular act. In this context, the extra dollars you get charged for those mysterious ticketing and handling fees are rarely a deal-breaker.

Over the years Ticketmaster has carved out a niche for itself by exploiting this phenomenon in a canny, if indefensible, way: Jacking up the fees even higher, and kicking parts of them back to the venues and artists to keep its hegemony over the business secure.

Live Nation, which, as Clear Channel’s concert arm, debauched the concert industry over the past decade, has long envied Ticketmaster’s money stream. Now it has a chance to cash in itself.

The only good news for consumers is that, once it solidifies its hold on the ticketing industry for its own concerts, the audience may start questioning why it’s paying an additional ten dollars a ticket to the company for the privilege of buying its own product.  (When you buy a lawn mower at Sear’s, the store doesn’t charge you a “purchase fee” or a “cashier’s fee.”)

But that’s only if the concert audience stops acting like sheep. Unlike the recorded music industry, which is having its lunch eaten by digitization, there’s no parallel on the horizon for live shows.