The Show Must Go On

In case you haven’t heard, Michael Jackson died recently, leaving behind a lot of debts, a custody battle over his kids, an estate that must look like a rubic cube and AEG Live holding the bag. I’ve know Brandon K (Randy) Phillips, president of AEG Live, for 30 years, when he was a piss ant manager representing the likes of Meadowlark Lemon. In 1992 The New York Daily News reported that Randy, when he was co-managing Rod Stewart (at the time Rod was a huge concert draw) had been skimming concert tickets from Rod’s shows and selling them to ticket brokers and pocketing the cash.

Well, its been reported that about 25% of the fans who bought tickets to the O2 shows in London are keeping their tickets as keepsakes instead of getting refunds. Go figure. And Randy recently publicly stated  that in addition to the fabulous wealth of video they have from the rehearsals and other shit will be released to help make up for AEG losses. And  there was talk of a tribute concert.

Well there turns out to be a little more to it. According to a friend of mine who is very close to Randy, all of this tacky shit will still leave a $30-$35 million shortfall for AEG that Randy has been ordered to fill. So the latest grand plan is to actually take this “tribute concert”, which is basically a clone of last week’s MJ memorial service, on tour! The funeral hits the road. My only question is will Randy schlep the corpse around with the show?

Tacky tacky tacky.

© 2009, Wayne Rosso. All rights reserved.

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Tags: AEG Live, concert, Michael Jackson, music, Randy Phillips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 3:30 AM and is filed under Music Biz, Stupid Marketing Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.