The big players ruining our gigs

The Competition Commission in Britain has just cleared a proposed merger that it had previously been concerned about to the extent that its provisional ruling had blocked the deal.

It is the merger of our biggest concert promotion company LiveNation and the huge online ticket agency Ticketmaster. I believe it's a truly dangerous step for live music.

The commission earlier said quite clearly that it was concerned that the deal would lead to higher prices and worse service for customers.

So one has to wonder what happened in the organisation's corridors and boardrooms to make it change its mind. A nice Christmas present perhaps? Someone pocketed corporate tickets for everything everywhere forever? Surely not.

When the commission issued the statement allowing the deal to go ahead, it said the merger wouldn't substantially reduce competition. Well, one glance at the companies involved and you'll know that's either foolish or disingenuous.

It isn't just a British deal of course, it's a massive global merger that is having to go through similar scrutiny processes with a number of different countries' regulatory bodies. The big beast to conquer will be the US Justice Department, which is looking closely at the proposals.

The US has already had to deal with a series of scandals this year linked to Ticketmaster's selling tactics, in particular its involvement in companies that do "secondary market" ticket reselling.

Yes, don't be in any doubt - the official seller also owns the tout.

There was a huge outcry when Bruce Springsteen ticket-buyers got screwed by Ticketmaster. If their preferred ticket - such as seating in a certain block or on a certain date in a run of gigs - wasn't available, instead of being offered alternative tickets they were redirected to the tout site, where they'd be offered the ticket they wanted at an inflated resale price.

Luckily Boss fans are a particularly strident bunch and this outrageous scam was stopped by some of Springsteen's angriest ever public statements, resulting in a bunch of weighty politicians jumping into the fray and the exposure forcing Ticketmaster's CEO to end the practice and apologise to fans.

But be warned - along with extortionate booking fees and added admin fees that already blight our online ticket services, various dodgy practices of this kind, involving over-intimate relationships between different aspects of commercialised concert-going, are going to become the norm.

Even when the practice is totally above board it is often against the interest of music itself. Look at the priority booking opportunities given to people who've purchased O2 mobile phone contracts, tied in with O2 sponsorship of many of Britain's biggest, most crucial touring venues.

Whatever the commercial justification, it makes no sense from the point of view of acts or their fans to have the tickets all snatched up by users of a specific mobile phone tariff.

Make your tariff deal better, don't just sell us the idea of getting concert tickets before other people, you horrible, horrible arseholes.

It is true that the top end of the live music scene is booming. The huge corporates, with huger sponsors, are sewing up maximising profit from headline events.

But don't for a second think that there's any kind of trickle-down benefit for smaller concert tours, whether from the artist or the audience point of view. Regardless of sponsorship and high-profile branding of shows, ticket prices are creeping upwards and show production values do not mirror that creep.

With ever-less-experienced or confident bands pushed to higher levels by televised marketing and hype before they're really ready, we're also seeing to a much greater extent tours where the band simply doesn't have the stagecraft, breadth of material or simple chops to carry the size of crowd or length of set expected for the ticket price.

Yet again the corporate model produces poorer entertainment for a crowd who don't know what they're missing.

The solution for artists is simple. Prefer - or at least give equal opportunities to - independent promoters whenever possible.

The bigger you get, the harder this is, but we need the big artists onboard with that not just the jobbing small-scalers.

In specialist genres this already happens naturally. Away from the hyperbole and disappointment of "tipped new bands" you'll see incredible country, metal, punk, folk, hip hop, electro or whatever with better deals for all concerned when independent live music operators are driven by a love for their particular genre of music.

It's the same as all consumer empowerment. We have to look a little deeper into who is doing the selling before we buy.

If you're about to spend your month's salary on a pair of tickets to a huge gig by someone super-famous, stop and think first. Will you really, truly enjoy that show as much as, say, five medium-sized gigs by bands playing music you really love, for the same overall price?

It's time for the live music industry to stop shouting about how great it is on the back of some decent Take That shows and actually make itself great.