Word: concerting
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When Peter Shapiro owned the wetlands, a New York City concert hall where Dave Matthews and Pearl Jam played in the 1990s, there was one sure path to a sellout: team up with Ticketmaster. Fans would line up outside record stores for tickets processed by Ticketmaster or call one of Ticketmaster's phone banks to score seats. No other distributor had the worldwide labyrinth of retail partnerships and phone outlets to move millions of tickets in minutes. And they charged for it--as much as $15 on a $50 ticket. But the music industry, if you hadn't noticed...
...raising the bar with a healthy dose of competition. While Ticketmaster, part of Barry Diller's Interactive Corp., still dominates the industry--it sold 128 million tickets last year, compared with Tickets.com's 76 million--it is fending off threats from every direction. Some of its biggest customers--concert promoters and professional sports leagues--are finding ways to sell their own tickets. Smaller ticketing outfits are attracting museums and concert halls with software that gives them closer fan connections. Worst of all, Ticketmaster arrived late to the secondary market--what used to be called scalping--which has gone legit...
...similar shift threatens to upend Ticketmaster's live-music business. Ticketmaster has exclusive rights to sell tickets for most of the 29,000 events organized by Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the U.S. That eight-year-old deal, which expires next year, accounts for about 20% of Ticketmaster's $1.1 billion in revenue. Live Nation's in-house ticketing system, through which it can sell up to 10% of its inventory, is already the third largest, and taking the rest inside would make it a power. But Ticketmaster isn't waiting to be cut out of the business...
...year ago, at a concert in Harare, Zimbabwe, Angélique Kidjo broke off in midperformance, walked to the front of the stage and declared: "I can't understand someone who is burning his own country and abducting his own people. Not being able to take care of your own people, becoming the worst nightmare, doesn't make you a leader. It makes you a monster. If you live by violence, you die by violence." The crowd was stunned. Berating Robert Mugabe, the 83-year-old autocrat who has overseen his country's implosion, was an invitation to be deported...
...other concert, any other pianist, and Rimsky-Korsakov's interlude would have been cut from the playlist. But not tonight. Because Paravicini has a musical memory that's closer to hard drive than human: he can play virtually any tune, in any style, in any key, after hearing it just once, even if it was years ago. The 27-year-old pianist is blind and severely learning disabled; he can't tie his own shoelaces or butter a piece of bread. Yet his musical gifts appear almost unlimited. With rehearsals over, Paravicini and his longtime teacher Adam Ockelford go into...