This may be a bad time to try and stir up sympathy for concert-promoting behemoth Live Nation, what with its impending merger with Tickemtaster and Congressional hearings and all, but if ever there was a way to do it, well, this would be it: Suggest that it could stand to take some tips from the airline industry, which was, prior to the executives of car companies taking their private jets to Washington to ask for a bailout, generally regarded as the worst-run business in America. Still, this article in Billboard at least does a good job of explaining the complex intricacies of pricing seats at concerts. There are a lot of competing needs when setting ticket prices—the need to sell out the venue, the need to keep the fans happy, and nthe eed to make as much money from the ticket sales as possible. The best way to do the first and the third things, economically speaking, is called “yield management,” or allowing the price of a given ticket to fluctuate based on demand. The problem is that, as the airlines have learned, this practice tends to make customers unhappy. MORE »