Mr. Azoff, You’re Under Oath

New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. is publicly saying that Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff contradicted himself in his Congressional testimony this past winter.  The issue at hand…you guessed it, secondary ticketing.
 
Mr. Azoff made it clear in his testimony that he was absolutely against secondary ticketing, but that’s not the way it seems.
 
Before the proposed marriage of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, Azoff devised a strategy code-named “Project Showtime,” a scheme that would offer premium seating directly to scalpers, and in return, all parties involved would split the profits. The deal would have seen 70% of the proceeds from the inflated sale price of the scalped tickets divided among Ticketmaster, the band and their reps while the brokers would keep the remaining 30%, the Wall Street Journal reported.
 
The idea was to simply to thwart their emerging rival, Live Nation.  Live Nation had once been Ticketmaster’s biggest client, until Nation announced they were launching their own in-house ticketing service. Their emergence into the ticketing market posed a serious threat for all in the ticketing business, thus the creation of Irving’s devious plan, “Project Showtime.”
 
Now, Rep. Pascrell is calling attention to Mr. Azoff’s false statement. 
 
"In February, the CEO of Ticketmaster, Irving Azoff, stood before two Congressional committees and stated that he’d like to see the secondary market eliminated. Mr. Azoff assured us that, had he been CEO at the time, Ticketmaster would never have purchased TicketsNow nor would the company have attempted to profit from online scalping,” said Pascrell.
 
“Once again Ticketmaster has been caught saying one thing in public and another in the boardroom," he added. 
 
Pascrell, an open critic to the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger, has his own solution to this ticketing mess in the form of legislation. Pascrell has proposed "The BOSS ACT" that would regulate secondary and concert ticketing. The acronym for the bill, H.R. 2669, stands for Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing Act.
 
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have both refused to comment.