Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped

Description

Since its launch in 1975, Ticketmaster has come to achieve such market dominance that some critics have denounced the company as an unlawful monopoly. Yet its path to the top was far from inevitable. Ticket Masters is based on first-person interviews with the key players and describes the behaviour of many world-renowned musicians from the righteous to the rapacious. With access to promoters, musicians and execs alike, Ticket Masters offers new riffs and wrinkles on a saga of ambition in the entertainment industry.

Dean Budnick is the executive editor of Relix magazine, the founder of www.jambands.com, and the author of Jam Bands and The Phishing Manual. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard's History of American Civilization program and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. Josh Baron is the editor in chief of Relix magazine and contributes to a variety of media outlets on music and ticketing. They both live in New York City.

"For anyone who's ever suffered rock concert sticker shock -- and we all have -- Dean Budnick and Josh Baron's Ticket Masters is the best seat in the house to the show behind the show: and inside look at those inexhaustible high-wire artists, corporate jugglers, and ringmasters who are always chasing one more deal, one more concession, one more buck in the empire burlesque that is the multi-billion-dollar rock concert business." -- Fred Goodman, author of Fortune's Fool and The Mansion on the Hill