Ray Waddell, the magazine’s touring expert, hits some ominous notes:

The potential merger would leave the other players in the music business marginalized.
[…]
Agents should be concerned that their relevance with artists could be diminished when the keys to the vault are held by one powerful entity. With live music already the most reliable income stream for most artists, labels would have even less influence.
[…]
Venues […] could lose any leverage they might have gained when the landscape held two giants competing for their business. Secondary market sellers like StubHub also are likely feeling anxiety, as their days of dominating this golden goose of ticket price lift might be numbered with this merger.

Emphases added. Those few sentences contain volumes of meaning. The short answer? The deal’s bad for everyone except for Ticketmaster and Live Nation. As for the fans?

A dynamically-priced house could become the norm.

That’s industry-speak for essentially auctioning off the house, and getting a big chunk of the cash now going to scalpers. There are complications, but I guess in the end that’s something both artists and promoters can get behind. (In a larger sense, of course, “dynamic pricing” wouldn’t explicitly raise the cost of tickets; given the scalping that goes on, those prices are in effect already being paid. But it will raise the formal cost of tickets a lot, possibly astronomically.*)

Waddell says ticket fees could be on their way out (presumably because fans would balk at paying an extra 20 percent to the same company they are buying the tickets from), but also says this:

It may well be that Ticketmaster would only oversee the ticketing end of the business. And with one company instead of two, the management end of Front Line might be less likely to pressure Live Nation for touring guarantees that make profit margins on ticket sales razor thin. With their combined efforts, ancillary revenues from ticketing lessen the importance of revenue from straight ticket sales.

… by which I think he means that the new company might just find it convenient to keep up the facade of a separate Ticketmaster, and continue the practice of divvying up the spoils from those ludicrous ticket fees behind the scenes.

One question: if “the management end of Front Line” isn’t pressuring promoters for the razoriest of razor-thin margins, would it be doing its job?

* From the new Ticketmaster/Live Nation point of view, the best system might be having people bid for seats at a show, with the top 10,000 bids for pairs of tix to a 20,000-seat venue getting them. This would have the added advantage to the companies involved of keeping the top price a secret. On the other hand, if the industry could find it in itself to play the game fairly, it could create a Priceline-esque sideshow where some music fans would idly send in $5 bids for shows, and scoring when the shows don’t sell out. This, in turn, would influence the industry even more than it does today to place artists in as small a venue as possible.