Live Nation board is "a circus"

In assessing the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation for Los Angeles magazine last year, I wrote that "ego and testosterone will only get you so far." So now it appears as if the egos are screaming at each other. The Wrap's Sharon Waxman picked up some juicy tidbits from Monday's board meeting that concluded with Barry Diller announcing that he would step down as chairman of the Bev Hills-based concert/ticketing company.

The meeting devolved into a shouting match between Diller and board members Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro and CEO Michael Rapino, not over control of the company - as some reports have said - but over something entirely banal: Postponing the date of an annual directors meeting. Emanuel, Shapiro and Rapino took Diller's recommendation to postpone the meeting as a power play of some kind. Apparently it really wasn't, and instead had to do with the New York Stock Exchange declining to give Live Nation a waiver to move its meeting. Emanuel and Shapiro didn't want to move the date.

That led to "a bunch of people sitting around and yelling at each other," one participant told Waxman. Cool.

Shapiro, formerly CEO of Six Flags and currently without a central portfolio, yelled at Diller: "You want to change the meeting (date) so you can kick us off the board! Do you think I'm some kind of imbecile?" Diller, sotto voce: "He thinks I'm some kind of super imbecile."

All this is just the latest sign of tension that has emerged from the financially struggling company. Earnings are down, as is the stock, because concert-goers have become highly selective in the acts they want to see.