Social networks are great places to learn about concerts ... after they happen.

The tweets, FourSquare check-ins and real-time Facebook wall posts of live concerts only provoke jealousy and torture people who are sitting at home reading those updates, wishing they had known the band was in town.

For Live Nation, that represents a missed opportunity to sell tickets. To remedy this sad situation, the nation's largest concert promoter has created (what else?) an app.

The company's Concert Calendar on Facebook is an effort to proactively reach out to fans and let them know about upcoming concerts in their area.

With tens of thousands of events in Live Nation's database every year, the app doesn't just serve up all the concerts within a geographic area. Instead, it focuses on a few recommendations that are based on the type of music that the user has indicated they listen to in their profile or the bands that they've "liked" on Facebook.

To further personalize the concerts it recommends, the app taps into data from Last.fm, an online music service that tracks listeners' tastes. For example, The Dead Weather fans tend to like the White Stripes, while Kenney Chesney listeners prefer the Zac Brown Band.

The app adds a viral, social layer by alerting users which of their Facebook friends have clicked the app's RSVP button to indicate they'll be going to a concert. The idea is that people are more likely to go to a concert if someone they know is also going.

Topping off the app is a game-ification mechanism similar to that of FourSquare. Check out the badges section on the lower left of the screen shot above. Users can also accumulate points for recruiting friends, RSVPing for concerts, posting on their walls and so on. The points can be redeemed for credit toward buying a ticket, MP3s or other Live Nation merchandise.

The app, which is currently only available by invitation, is neither the first nor only one to help music fans find concerts. Songkick, StubHub and others also have local concert-finders for both the Web and on mobile devices.

But for Live Nation, it's already proven to be effective. In testing the RSVP feature on Facebook, the company found that every RSVP click correlates with about $5.30 in increased ticket sales, according to Gretchen Fox, Live Nation's vice president of social media.

-- Alex Pham

Twitter/ @AlexPham

What could be more inoccuous than paperless tickets? It even has an environmentally friendly ring to it.

On the contrary, paperless tickets are  becoming the latest grounds for a skirmish between Live Nation Entertainment's Ticketmaster, ticket resellers and consumer advocates.

Backed by Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster, a group of concert promoters and artist managers this week declared war on resellers who buy tickets in bulk and then resell them on sites such as StubHub, Craigslist and elsewhere.

"It erodes the heart of our business," said Randy Levy, an independent concert promoter who is a member of the group, dubbed the Fans First Coalition.

The solution: "paperless tickets" that are largely non-transferable. That means only the original buyer can claim the ticket on the day of the event.

Not so fast, says the Fan Freedom Project, backed by the National Consumers League and founded earlier this year by Jon Potter, former director of the Digital Media Assn.

Potter argues that the real agenda for promoters who back paperless tickets is to prevent consumers from selling or giving away tickets they have purchased.

"Consumers should have the right to determine what they can do with a ticket once they've purchased it," Potter said. "That means being able to sell it at both higher or lower than face value."

The controversy over paperless tickets is not new. Miley Cyrus and Bruce Springsteen both experimented with paperless ticketing back in 2009 for their concert tours.

Let's face it. The live music business is one that fans and media approach with a skeptical eye, albeit one that's deserved after years of increasing ticket fees, last-minute fire sales and ticketing systems that seemingly play into the hands of the secondary market. So, when artists and promoters do something right, such as Prince offering about 85% of the house at $25 a pop -- a figure that includes service fees -- a hearty well-done is in order. 

Three of Prince's 21 Los Angeles dates went on sale this morning, and if anyone was curious as to how a superstar such as Prince could price more than half the Forum at $25, the answer looked to be apparent as soon as one went to make a purchase. There were, of course, the $25 all-in tickets, but the next tier was a drastic hike. Those who wanted to guarantee a seat outside the Forum's upper deck (the colonnade section) would have to spring for a $205 ticket. 

What's more, those $205 tickets were running deep into the Forum's loge section. If one wanted to ensure one of the absolute best seats in the Forum, Ticketmaster directed you to its Platinum Ticket section, which offered premium loge seats for as high as $450.

But again, there is good news in all this, as Pop & Hiss is not interested here in criticizing an artist for pricing more than 80% of the house at $25. A spokeswoman for promoter Live Nation confirms that there are in fact loge seats available for $25, and those are, no doubt, among the first to go. So those who are gambling on snaring better seats for one of Prince's forthcoming 18 gigs, there is hope, although what percentage of the loge is selling for $25 is unknown.

When ticketing and promotion giants Live Nation and Ticketmaster pledged to merge in 2009, the companies promised a fan-friendly operation with greater transparency. Yet when it came to addressing industry concerns at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas -- the largest music biz gathering in the country -- top executives from the newly christened Live Nation Entertainment were no shows. 

That changes in 2011, when Nathan Hubbard, the CEO of Live Nation Entertainment's Ticketmaster outfit, will appear on a Friday morning panel dubbed "Indie Davids Take On Goliath Ticketmaster-Live Nation."

Related: SXSW 2011: The music stories to watch

The conversation will be moderated by Andrew Dreskin, CEO of the ticketing upstart Ticketfly. Those slated to speak include Spaceland Productions head Mitchell Frank, John Read of the Department of Justice, Boche Billions of independent booker the Billions Corporation and Andrew Kaplan, the talent buyer for Chicago-based JAM Productions.

In a surprise move that has wide-reaching implications for the local live music scene, Brian Murphy, former chairman of Southern California music for Live Nation, the country’s top concert promoter, has jumped ship to become West Coast president for AEG Live — Live Nation’s strongest competitor.

“It was the toughest decision I’ve ever had to make in business,” Murphy said in an exclusive interview with The Times. “There are employees I’m leaving who have been with me for 20 years. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I’m an L.A. guy, and AEG Live is an L.A.-centric company.”

One of the most respected promoters in the American concert industry — and a pillar of the SoCal scene, the country’s most competitive live music market — Murphy has worked closely with a Who’s Who of pop music’s biggest touring acts: U2, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica among them.

Rick Mueller will remain in place as president of Live Nation’s California division.

Ticketmaster is the company everyone loves to hate, and today it acknowledged as much. Quietly, the ticketing behemoth that's now part of Live Nation Entertainment launched a blog, making a very real effort to finally put a consumer-friendly face on the largely automated, fee-heavy operation. 

In a post attributed to CEO Nathan Hubbard, the company admitted the following: "We get it -- you don’t like service fees. You don’t like them mostly because you don’t understand what the heck they are for." Hubbard doesn't totally break down the allotment of the fees, but reiterates some of what is already known. He wrote, "Most of the parties in the live event value chain participate in these service fees either directly or indirectly -- promoters, venues, teams, artists and, yes, ticketing companies."

So fees are not going to go away, but Ticketmaster is making an effort to let customers know what kind of financial commitment they'll be making the moment they come to the site. For years, Ticketmaster waited until a potential concertgoer was nearly done with purchasing a ticket before unveiling the fees, which typically add a minimum of $10-$15 to the price. 

Now, at least for most events, prospective buyers will see a portion of the fees as soon as they select the tickets. So, for example, let's say you want to see Nick Cave's Grinderman at the Music Box @ Fonda (you should). A drop-down menu tells you that the $30 is actually $40.30. It's not until one clicks through the site that the fees are broken down, with a $2.50 facility charge, which goes to the venue operator, and a $7.80 "convenience charge," some of which goes to Ticketmaster, the promoter, credit card companies and artists. 

Yet the actual cost of the ticket still isn't $40.30. 

The final price comes to $47.30, thanks to an additional "order processing fee" and the $2.50 charge to print your own ticket. All told, fees add $17.30 to a single $30 ticket. In instances where the promoter owns the venue, the latter is double-dipping of a sort. The Goldenvoice-run Fonda comes with a $2.50 faculty fee, and Live Nation's own Palladium tacks on $1. 

Company chief Irving Azoff acknowledged some of the shortcomings of the new features on his Twitter page. He wrote, "can’t boil all fees down to a per ticket fee until we know how many tix are bought and shipping method chosen, so it has to happen later."

Live Nation chief Irving Azoff may have taken to Twitter earlier this week to air his grievances with “jerk” journalists, wax philosophical on what the music industry “needs” (um, Mark Cuban? Really?) and get in the proverbial last word.

But Azoff’s online antics weren’t enough to distract from his company’s financial predicament, with Live Nation on Thursday reporting a substantial second quarter loss caused by the Great Summer Concert Ticket Sales Slump of 2010.

Live Nation’s net loss in the three months leading up to Jun. 30 swelled to $36.4 million from the same period a year earlier. But the bad news didn’t end there. The number of concerts staged by the company in the second quarter fell by 2.7% to 5,553 from a year ago, with total attendance down 5.7%. As well, the company’s revenue -- including the yield from Ticketmaster operations -- was down $135.6 million.

On the bright side, the concert-promoting-artist-managing colossus said that it met its own financial targets and that it is staying on track to achieve $40 million in cost synergies this year. And it said that despite a $40-million drop in adjusted operating income announced last month, Live Nation’s revenues grew to $1.27 billion from $1.05 billion (if you exclude the Ticketmaster results, that is).

Speaking of last words, Azoff tried to put a smiley spin on the quarterly report in a statement.

“Key artist tours anticipated during the summer and balance of the year for our artist management business include the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett, Kid Rock, Kings of Leon and the Scorpions, just to name a few, and it is their success that will help fuel our company’s growth,” Azoff said. “As we look to the future, we are more confident than ever in our belief that Live Nation Entertainment has a unique business model to service artists and fans.”

-- Chris Lee

Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapino has already accused the press of "scaring" artists from touring. Now the company's executive chairman, Irving Azoff, has gone so far as to call Billboard journalist-commentator Glenn Peoples a "jerk." 

Azoff's Twitter went live Tuesday. A spokesperson confirmed that the Twitter feed is indeed run by the famed industry executive and artist manager (the Eagles, Christina Aguilera and more). One of his first tweets, however, drew some criticism. Wrote Azoff: "So if you want ticket prices to go down stop stealing music."

Many, including Perez Hilton, took the comment as a direct attack on music consumers, implying that the tweet was instantly putting a Big Giant Corporation in one corner, and recession-addled fans in another. Writing his morning column on industry news on Billboard.biz, Peoples contended that "Twitter is hardly the place to reveal a company’s strategy for dealing with the competing forces of rising artist demands and consumer demands for cheaper tickets, but blaming high ticket prices solely on piracy is disappointing."

Thursday night at Live Nation Enterainment headquarters in Beverly Hills, musician/producer/Eurythmic/renaissance man Dave Stewart and branding expert/author/ "marketing guru" Mark Simmons held a media event to introduce their new book, "The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide." It's a playful, genre-busting tome that discusses ways in which creativity can be used in the business world.

The pair discussed the ideas in the book, which has chapter titles such as "Idea Spaghetti," "Mr. Left Brain, Meet Mr. Right" and "Far Out," for about half an hour. Then Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, who's had a rough few weeks, sat down beside Stewart to have a one-on-one conversation about how Rapino and his company employs creativity to sell tickets to the 22,000 concerts that the conglomerate promotes worldwide each year.

Stewart asked Rapino how Live Nation harnesses their collective imagination in the service of filling seats, and Rapino acknowledged that at times it's a struggle: "The irony in our business is, we're kind of considered a sexy business because we're in the music business, but what we've really struggled with is that the band is really the creative front, and they're on the stage." Live Nation, he continued, is the conduit through which the professional creatives -- musicians -- must travel to reach the ears of the audience.

Artists, he said, have been struggling to adjust their business model as concerts have become the major means by which they earn their livings. "The band has been reinventing itself for 20 years. I was at the Rihanna show last night at the Staples Center, and it's a spectacular show. The band has done their job. The band has elevated the show, the song, the performance, and us handlers kind of got lazy along the way, and whether it was the record guy or the ticket guy."