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."