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.