The WSJ reports that Ticketmaster and supermanager Irving Azoff are joining forces:

Ticketmaster Inc. has reached an agreement to acquire what is widely regarded as the music world’s most powerful artist-management company and install the management company’s boss at the helm of the combined company, a bid to find a new business model for an industry undergoing seismic shifts.

The complex transaction would combine the world’s largest ticketing company with its most influential gatekeeper for talent. Irving Azoff and his company, Front Line Management Inc., handle the affairs of scores of the world’s biggest singers and musicians, including Christina Aguilera, the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett and Neil Diamond.

The Journal should be credited with the scoop, but the story raises as many questions as it answers:

1 ) Now we have two large music-related agencies attempting to mass talent and create some new centers of gravity in the music business. Live Nation, of course, is working on so-called 36o deals with people like Jay-Z and Madonna. Now Ticketmaster’s trying to get into the game, but it’s not clear what exactly either party is getting.

2 ) The story says Ticketmaster is essentially buying into Azoff’s company, taking over some unspecified part of his interest and another 30 percent that Warner owned. So Ticketmaster is buying not 360 deals with those major names but rather … part of a guy who owns ten percent or so of the careers of some big touring artists.

3 ) As for Azoff, he’s getting 4.5 percent of a company that, besides having the distinction of being arguably the greediest and most pointless operation in a business distinguished by such institutions, has a much-circumscribed future since Live Nation decided to rip consumers off in the ticket-service-fee scam itself, rather than farming it out to Ticketmaster.

4) Barring some nefarious scheme by Ticketmaster to get into the concert business, the deal seems designed to create tension; how does it help the Eagles, when touring, to have their main promoter, Live Nation, know that its arch rival in a sense owns a piece of the band?

5 ) In theory, the Eagles would therefore be looking for non-Live Nation venues to play in, so that Ticketmaster could skim its grubby take off the service fees rather than Live Nation.

6 ) But how is that good for the Eagles? The band would presumably be wanting to play in the venues that offer it the biggest guarantee, not the ones that benefit its manager through some crazy-complex deal he cut with the goons from Ticketmaster. Indeed, under Azoff’s tutelage, the band was a brave new explorer in the world of the stratospheric ticket price. (Back in the 1990s, the band tried to sell seats for a show in Chicago for nearly $300. Most of the tickets ended up going for about $120—at the time, an insanely high price itself. ) And now, of course, the band makes millions a night.

And that provides a perfect illustration of how nutty the ticket-service-fee industry is. The Ticketmaster fees for Eagles tickets back in the day totaled nearly $20, some big chunk of which was kicked back to the band. So now, Ticketmaster owns some piece of the Eagles, and the Eagles’ manager owns some piece of Ticketmaster, so when the exorbitant ticket charges start being divvied up, at a certain point, the money is going to be going around in circles. If Ticketmaster kicks back money to the band, some ten percent of it goes back to Azoff, and thence back to Ticketmaster, one of whose largest single shareholders is now … Irving Azoff.

7 ) This arrangement seems oddly remunerative for Irving Azoff, not least because the guy arranging the deals bewteen his clients and Ticketmaster will be …  Irving Azoff. Here’s how the Journal addressed this pungent aspect of the story:

Placing a talent manager in charge of the dominant ticketing system raises the potential for various conflict-of-interest issues. Mr. Azoff, in particular, is known for using the leverage his stable of artists provides to procure favorable terms in an array of deals.

Mr. Azoff said he wouldn’t attempt to use the combined resources of the new company to give his clients an advantage in the market for concertgoers’ dollars. “All artists will benefit,” he said, “whether they’re Front Line artists or not.”

But the issue isn’t his giving his clients an advantage; it’s that what might be good for Ticketmaster might not be best for them.

8 ) The final thing to be remembered is that Azoff isn’t just a manager; he was once the head of MCA records (now evolved into Universal). It’s possible that he’s going for a new paradigm that transcends Ticketmaster’s previous business: A label-without-the-label, with artists leveraging their cash power in different ways in the retail world and on stage. The talent pool Azoff controlled was a good start; in the end, history will probably record that Ticketmaster needed him to stay relevant rather than vice versa.

9 ) Speaking of which, Live Nation, you will recall, was formerly the concert arm of Clear Channel, which though good hard work managed to make itself even more reviled than Ticketmaster. Hard to see how Ticketmaster doesn’t try to bury the memory of its tarnished brand as well.

Wired News scores an interview with a woman the RIAA is suing for file-sharing. Earlier this month, the RIAA elevated her to the rank of “vexatious,” in a court filing, for having the temerity to fight the rogue organization’s pointless and gratuitous suit. This week, showing that even an online tech magazine knows how to generate page views, Wired revisits the case and lets Whitney Harper speak for herself—and share with the magazine a few of her old cheerleading pix.

A recent interview in the Wall Street Journal with Sarah Vowell, the writer, attributed the radio program she contributes to, “This American Life,” to National Public Radio. That’s incorrect. It’s distributed by Public Radio International, a competitor to NPR. Today, in Jim Fusilli’s review of the Old Crow Medical Show (I couldn’t find a non-$ link for that one), he says “A Prarie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor’s long-running variety show, is NPR’s as well. It’s not; it started at Minnesota Public Radio and is distributed by Public Radio International also, was a PRI show and is now distributed by American Public Media, a cousin company to PRI.

The fault lies with the papers, of course, which shouldn’t be publishing inaccuracies, but, as I wrote about in great detail here, also with the public broadcasting world, which for a variety of internal political reasons doesn’t explain to viewers important distinctions about the source of their programming.

From a Styles section story today:

Yana Collins Lehman, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”

Ms. Collins Lehman, 36, thought: “Oh my God, I’m watching too much news.”

Modern PR campaigns are often constructed as intensely as a political race, and you can see a lot of the same techniques, notably the construction and manipulation of talking points that stress the angles that make the subject look good and deftly avoid the ones that don’t.

Whatever else can be said of Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™, she and her network have a PR department that doesn’t give up. They continue to generate an astonishing number of major stories about her, and even seem to have the NY Times and the Washington Post playing a kinky game of Couric-inspired one-upsmanship. Howard Kurtz was riding high for a while with a blizzard of upbeat, Katie-friendly missives, culminating entirely unnecessarily with a massive story for the Post in August that answered the journalistic question, “What did the fourth- or fifth-most-watched news anchor do during the Democratic convention?” The Times’ David Carr did his own piece on Couric last month.

(Hitsville’s comments on Kurtz are here and here.)

And now Friday, for no discerable reason, the Times weighs in again, retreading for the third time the news that Katie has a webcam, or something.

The subject is purportedly about how Couric, despite her lagging ratings on the CBS Evening News, is rebounding, helped along by her much-You-Tubed Sarah Palin interviews and a webcast she’s been doing. Indeed, “Couric rebounds with web and Palin” is the helpful headline. A few grafs into the story, Jacques Steinberg writes this:

In an interview this week in her CBS News office, Ms. Couric spoke of the satisfaction she has found in the fresh set of metrics that of late have collectively served as a reminder that she and her program still matter.

The problem is that we never hear what those metrics are*.

… but Couric is satisfied, so they must be good!

But if they are so good… why don’t we get to hear what they are? The status of her broadcast ratings are never detailed… and we never hear how many people actually watch her newfangled webcast.

And the story contains an awful lot of passages like this:

And yet Ms. Couric and Mr. Kaplan have done much to make their own luck. For months they have been giving over an increasing portion of the “CBS Evening News” to political coverage.

Emphasis added, here and throughout. Do they really get credit for thinking that up? Couldn’t, you know, a hamster that didn’t get paid $15 million, sucking up a hobbled network’s resources, have made that call?

Here’s another one:

Those features also served to introduce many of the show’s producers to the senior advisers of the various campaigns. In the case of the McCain campaign, those contacts were further solidified in July when Ms. Couric and Mr. Kaplan sought to provide a counterbalance to an interview she did in Jordan with Senator Barack Obama, his first with a network anchor during a highly publicized international tour. By satellite from the Middle East, Ms. Couric conducted a separate interview with Mr. McCain that was then shown on the same broadcast.

It was a gesture the McCain campaign would remember…

Giving Couric and her production team credit for having contacts with political campaigns is what President Bush would call the soft bigotry of low expectations. What’s next? “Upon taking the job, Couric leaped into action, immediately sending out change-of-address notices and ensuring that her news operation was on the email lists of the major figures vying for the presidency.”

And of course, CBS did the McCain interview because there was criticism from the right that the network news anchors were all following Obama’s European tour like a bunch of Rolling Stones groupies.

But such PR-heavy material doesn’t just demand that you take the subjects on their own terms. You also have to not ask them the hard questions.

If you were interviewing Katie Couric, wouldn’t you ask her a) What she thought of Sarah Palin; b) What the fallout from the McCain campaign had been (If nothing else, they must have had something to say about CBS’s having spread the agony out over a week); c) What her plan was to revive her newscast’s stagnant ratings; d)  … and those are the ones I thought of off the top of my head. None was broached in the story.

The prospect of her leaving the position, which the WSJ said was being discussed back in April, is brought up only tangentially, and the Journal wasn’t given credit for the scoop. In this way, too, the Times was following Howard Kurtz. He didn’t give the Journal credit either.

* Ironically, Couric had been improving in the ratings, hitting almost six million viewers even before her Palin bump from the doldrums in the low five millions she’d been in. But it was still lower than where she’d been the year before. Too bad there hasn’t been much big news around to boost the ratings!

In the premiere of ABC’s Life on Mars Thursday, our hero, Jason O’Mara, finds himself living in 1973. (Don’t ask.) He’s wandering around in a latter-day hippie era in Manhattan with his love interest, Gretchen Mol; they go into one of those old-fashioned record stores.

Still marveling at his time-travel experience, he tells her:

“What you see here, all of this, vinyl albums, they all become obsolete. Replaced with CDs, and digital music that you listen to on MP3 players this big. And the sound, it’s… well, it’s much worse.”

The last line is played for a laugh. As this idea grows into general thinking, the labels (with iTunes) will be poised to sell us all our digital music again–in a superior compression format, and suddenly audio quality will be all the rage. Look for a compliant media to excitedly put this on their agenda as well.

As for the show, you can see the whole episode here, though it requires a lot of screwing around with a dedicated ABC video player.

The player is buggy; it appears not to be optimized for Firefox on Vista–one of those signs a certain company (Disney) is doing things for the benefit of another big company (Microsoft) and not consumers.

(And would it kill them to use standardized controls, like hitting the space bar for pause?)

I haven’t seen the BBC version of Life on Mars, which I assume is better, but the U.S. version isn’t without a sense of humor. If the frenetic scene constructions, steel-blue lighting and CSI-style patois seem a little hyperreal, it’s because they are. The intro goes on a little too long, but it’s all worth it for the transition, which includes a very nice use of the Bowie tune that gives the show its title.

I’m as happy to nihil nisi as the next guy, but a new story in the latest Rolling Stone reminds me about a previous time the magazine took a deep look at John McCain. The piece was written by the late David Foster Wallace.

It was a classic example of “celebrity-on-celebrity” journalism, in which a bad magazine calls up one celebrity to write—or, more frequently, just interview—another celebrity. Rolling Stone once let Carrie Fisher interview Madonna and the result was somewhat horrifying. (”She will answer any question because she is genuinely interested in her own reply,” Fisher wrote, creating new dimensions of solipsism between interviewer and interviewee.) But mags love this arrangement: The magazine gets exponentially more PR out of the deal, and readers, of course get the square root of the substance.

Wallace’s 2000 McCain piece, it should be noted in fairness, may be the worst thing Wallace ever wrote, but also in fairness it should be noted that even in the context of celebrity-on-celebrity journalism it is not only one of the most superficial and hackneyed accretions of blowjobby pontification ever published, it is an insidious piece of propaganda urging “Young Voters,” as DFW calls them, to support a right-wing nut job. Over many pages, Wallace nattered on about McCain’s heroism, and how Young Folks were just gonna go crazy for him once they overcame their cynicism, and—my favorite part—how, like the wise old cabbies and barbers of old, the cameramen for all the big TV networks knew so much more about politics than the on-air commentators:

Leaving aside their coolness and esprit de corps, be advised that Rolling Stone’s single luckiest journalistic accident this week was his bumbling into hanging around with these camera and sound guys. This is because network-news techs—who all have worked countless campaigns, and who have neither the raging egos of journalists nor the self-interested agenda of the McCain2000 staff to muddy their perspective—turn out to be way more acute and sensible political analysts than anybody you’ll read or see on TV, and their assessment of to-day’s Negativity developments is so extraordinarily nuanced and sophisticated that only a small portion of it can be ripped off and summarized here.

DFW could do no wrong at the time, and I took no little flak for my essay on the piece in Salon.

Now comes Tim Dickinson’s contrarian look at McCain’s personal mythology, “Make Believe Maverick,” an effective and persuasive portrait of a first-class scumbag.

Questions: Why did Rolling Stone ever run DFW’s tongue-bath? Which writer, do you think, got more money? Which one got edited harder? Why didn’t Wallace do the reporting back then about McCain’s crummy service record or his despicable behavior toward his first wife?