Despite Impending Merger, Live Nation Shows No Longer Available Through Ticketmaster

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Last week, shareholders of both Ticketmaster and Live Nation voted to approve the companies' impending merger, which was first announced last February. The stock price of both companies rose sharply after the announcement, and the Dow Jones Newswire reported that the U.S. Justice Department could approve the merger as early as this month. The deal is worth a reported $720 million.

In a twist Rocks Off probably would not understand even if we had gone to business school, this means that, effective immediately, tickets for all Live Nation shows are no longer available through Ticketmaster.com. Instead, they are available through livenation.com or area LN venues' individual sites: hob.com/houston for House of Blues, woodlandscenter.org for the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion or toyotacentertix.com for Toyota Center. (Not all Toyota Center concerts are produced by Live Nation, however.) Since it does not have a dedicated Web site, tickets for Verizon Wireless Theater shows are only available through Live Nation's site.

Got all that? Good... maybe you can help explain it to us. Rocks Off is also wondering what the name of this new entertainment megacompany might be. We suppose Ticket Nation is a good and logical guess, but we kind of like Live Master much better.