Irving Azoff U R A Jerk

Ah, you gotta love music execs these days. They’re so calm, well-mannered and easy-going, except for most of them, especially Irving ‘Sweetheart’ Azoff. Irvy is not only a manager-extraordinaire but also the head honcho of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. None of which makes it a conflict of interest, or so he and LN/TM tell Congress. One other important thing you should know about Irvy is that he happens to be a schmuck.

Irvy was railing to a Billboard reporter that the problem with the touring business isn’t the prices, the over-saturation of acts on the road or the economy but instead, it’s the press, who’ve done the terrible disservice of reporting on the facts about the downturn in touring revenues. And now, just to compound it, Irvy’s tweeting that that the fourth estate are making him look even worse for reporting what he said before. What’s even funnier is that he insists that his angry, ridiculous comments have nothing to do with his work in the record biz but are just his own personal observations. To be fair, if you spit out crap like this, you’d probably want to retract it too: “so if you want ticket prices to go down, stop stealing music” or (referring to the Billboard writer) “glenn peoples u r a jerk.”

Now if you wanna step back and inject some logic into ol’ Irvy’s thinking, you can start with his original premise, that the press is to blame for the downturn in the touring biz. Irvy doesn’t dispute the info that’s being reported about the biz being bad now. Instead he’s mad that the reporters are actually telling people about it. It’s kind of like the Pentagon saying that the real problem with Afghanistan is that writers are reporting on the bad stuff that’s happening there. If only reporters were a bunch of zombie stenographers who would just toe the line on whatever ol’ Irvy wants them to say. Forget about them reporting the facts. Maybe they should just lie and say that the concert biz is doing great and then Irvy will be happy and then the industry will magically pick up again and make lots and lots of money, right?

Of course, that’s impossible and it just goes to show not only how out of touch Irvy is but that’s also another case of the old guard of the industry blaming every one else for the biz’s problems. That leads into his other stupid tweet about downloading. His ‘logic’ is this- if teens suddenly stopped unauthorized downloads, the touring biz would offer low ticket prices. Mind you, this isn’t something that he’d put in writing or have signed in an affidavit, not when he’s sown up the management AND ticket-selling angle. He and his two companies that monopolize the ticket industry still can’t explain or justify all the of the ‘convenience’ fees they heap on to ticket prices so should we trust them to generously drop ticket prices if the CD sales or digital sales rebound? How about the fact that they probably won’t at all rebound soon or maybe ever? Does ol’ Irvy really think much about how he’ll manage otherwise? Probably not. More likely, he’s thinking up a lot of other people to blame. There’s the government, the unions, the artists… He can tweet them all as villains, right?

So ol’ Irvy’s lashing out here and pointing fingers at everyone but himself, just as many clueless leaders of the old music industry do so well nowadays (which is one of the few things they do well now). He can cry, scream and whine all he wants but all of his tweets add up to crapola except for one pertinent fact: it ain’t the press or fans that are the real problem Irvy ‘cause U R a jerk.

Irvy’s Billboard article

News about Irvy’s Twitter rants