The next generation music company
Live Nation announced today financial results for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2007, and the comments from Michael Rapino, the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer, where full of Madonna references. Here are a few excerpts.
“During 2006 – our first year as a public company – we defined a vision for our company: to build a global live music network that provides touring artists the opportunity to maximize their revenues and expand fan reach all under one aligned platform. We also set forth a three-year,
three-pronged strategy to fix, build and expand our core business in order to align our assets by 2009 when we believe our new growth initiatives including ticketing and the addition of new artists in our Live Nation
Artists, or Artist Nation, division will be poised to add to our bottom line”, Rapino said.
“The signing of Madonna validates our platform and long-term strategy and we
believe will propel our growth as we aggressively move to build out new
revenue streams.”
“Our Artist Nation strategy proposes to more effectively and efficiently utilize this network than it has in the past by providing
artists with additional services that can be efficiently executed over or sold to fans across our distribution platform. Our recent signing of Madonna – one of the most influential artists and business women in the world – validates our strategy and the strength of our proposition. We look forward to growing this segment of our business as additional artists seek to join us.”
“In early October 2007, we entered into a 10-year arrangement with Madonna which gives us the rights to virtually all of her music-related businesses. We believe this relationship validates Live Nation as the next generation music company and provides a new avenue for cash flow growth for the company as we are able to utilize our extensive distribution platform to monetize artist rights. While we believe that the Madonna arrangement
provides Live Nation with a sound financial return itself, that return will significantly improve as additional artists are added to the Live Nation roster.”
“During the quarter, we did make additional investments in our Live Nation Artists, or Artist Nation, infrastructure to prepare for the execution of the Madonna relationship and future expected artist deals. Already this division has over 300 employees focused on providing the services to artists to monetize their diverse rights outside of the tour while leveraging Live Nation’s global distribution and marketing platform.”
Source: Live Nation via PRNewsWire.