While reading the Billboard interview with Irving Azoff and Michael Rapino, I realized that the more I think about the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, the more it seems to me to be illegal or something.

Say I’m an author. I have an agent. Let’s call him Joe. He works for a guy named Irving who … owns the publishing house where my book is being published. Let’s call it “Book Nation.”

Joe comes to me and says, Great news! I got a great offer to publish your book!

Great, you say. Who’s going to publish it?

Joe looks delighted: It’s Book Nation!

How can you trust your agent?

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Now, in the concert world, there’s more than an advance and a book tour. There are many more layers of complexity: Guarantees and grosses; the size of the venues and scope of the tour (Big? Small? Or maybe: Start out small, go heavy on the marketing, try to make a second pass after word of mouth of the first shows get out?); the route of the tour and the dates (Summer good, winter not so much); percentages of merchandising; cost of tickets (and of course the artist’s cut of the ticket fees).

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Irving Azoff artfully talked around the issue in that Billboard interview: “Our managers make those decisions with their artists,” he said. “The artist has the final decision.”

But artists aren’t qualified to figure out how they are getting screwed in each of those areas. That’s what they have managers for.

The artists are going to have to hire a manager to protect themselves in their dealings with … their manager.

(And in the new Live Nation, which represents literally hundreds of artists, you’re never going to know when you’re getting screwed over by the company’s need to take care of another one of their stable.)

Azoff says his management company was “decentralized.” Yeah, right. Readers will I hope have noticed that Hitsville has refrained from making reference to the famous sobriquet attached, many years ago, to Azoff—”the poison dwarf”—on the grounds that it’s an ad hominem attack and that it makes fun of his height. But it’s worth noting that Azoff has a longstanding reputation as a major industry motherfucker, and people who get called things like that generally don’t run “decentralized operations.”

But here’s where the artists who once depended on Azoff’s ferocity are going to get screwed. He’s now the head of a public company. He’s duty bound to maximize shareholder value. He’s duty bound to lie to the artists (and journalists) about how decentralized things are going to be in order to maximize shareholder value.

But no matter how complex the modern rock ‘n’ roll tour is, it all comes back down to one reductive and clear fact: When an artist goes out on tour, there’s x dollars to be made. Every dollar the artist doesn’t get, the promoter does get. If Azoff wasn’t screwing over his artists, he wouldn’t be doing his job.

How is this arrangement legal?

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Previously in Hitsville:
Constantly updated: The Ticketmaster-Live-Nation unholy-matrimony news round-up!
Five arguments against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger
Irving Azoff kicks it old school
The music industry’s Putin
Bad merger coverage
WWBD (What would Bono do?)
Billboard’s analysis of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger
Springsteen and Landau bash Ticketmaster and Live Nation!
P.S. on Ticketmaster: A case study, starring Bruce Springsteen
Why the potential Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a very bad idea
Is Ticketmaster trying to muddle the fees issue?
The Azoff-Ticketmaster deal: Bad news for concert-goers—and the music industry
Why you so seldom read about obscene Ticketmaster-style ticketing charges