How Live Nation Will Get By Without Merch Cuts

Landlady’s Adam Schatz leaks the strategy.

… And the motion passes: now adjusting for inflation we will require every Live Nation board member to have a guitar hanging on the wall of their office valued at $7,000 and above.

*Bangs gavel on top of Marshall Amp Mini-fridge*

I appreciate everyone coming to this emergency board meeting, I know there is great concern about meeting our profit goals for Q4 of 2023 given the recent announcements about Live Nation ceasing to take a percentage of merchandise sales from artists performing at our venues. But I am pleased to report that with the following cutbacks, we should see no negative impact on future earnings through this experimental humanitarian effort.

Live Nation is proud to be taking the following measures to reassure our shareholders that we will make up for any lost revenue due to ceasing “merch cuts”:

  • Uneaten green room hummus will be sanitized and re-introduced to the “mother batch” which can then be distributed to green rooms the following day.
  • A “woo” tax will be leveed against anyone who yells “woo” during brief pauses between songs, at 8% of the total ticket cost.
  • Electricity bills will be reduced by replacing all of our LED bulbs with security guards in night gowns brandishing candlestick holders.
  • Coat check will now charge an additional fee to get your coat back, and a third fee to make sure we didn’t hide any smushed miniature Snickers bars in hard-to-detect pockets.
  • Capacity for every venue will be tripled using the “kids-in-trenchcoat” method of vertical growth with tiered ticketing, where Platinum tier will get you on top, Diamond in the middle, and Gold as the base.
  • Pre-show playlists will be shifted to the public domain, using the following system across all of our venues: Mondays are “Camptown Races,” Tuesdays are “America The Beautiful,” Wednesdays are “A440 Tuning Pitch,” Thursdays are “Frere Jaques,” Fridays are the “Kars for Kids theme” (under perpetual license by our CEO), Saturdays are “Pomp & Circumstance,” and Sundays will be “Choose-Your-Own Shanty”
  • In between the last song of the set and the encore, flight attendants will be moving throughout the crowd to offer the Live Nation Credit Card which will gain users access to the “Service Charge Lounge” which will have chairs.
  • Fire Alarms will be replaced by Bugle Boys
  • Fog Machines will be replaced by tea kettles or angry prospectors, depending on region
  • Instead of mopping the floors after shows, we won’t
  • Bathroom use is permitted with the bathroom key which can be obtained by answering a ponytailed troll his (always his) questions-three, usually about the “good old days when bands still rocked” or his “bad back.” Ultimately this will reduce toilet paper cost, probably, and gives our trolls a second job.

Adam Schatz is a musician, writer, record producer and human being. His band Landlady has three records out and another on the way. He most recently produced Allegra Krieger’s album The Joys of Forgetting and has successfully cooked pad thai, soup dumplings and bagels since the pandemic began. He has a monthly Patreon page and that is currently his only monthly income, isn’t that cool? His favorite new hobby is getting emailed by coffee shops he’s been to once. Find him on Twitter here and hear Landlady here.

(Photo credit: Sasha Arutyunova.)