'Hyde Park Was Our Madison Square Garden' - Live Nation Speak Out
Thursday, 01 November 2012
Written by Elliott Batte
Tour and gig promotion company Live Nation have revealed more of the details behind their decision to not renew their tender that allows them to host events at London’s Hyde Park, claiming that The Royal Parks Agency - the governing body of the park - were demanding too much money.
Live Nation have been holding events at Hyde Park for the past 15 years, but the company recently split from The Royal Parks Agency in a highly-publicised affair which saw them write a formal letter of complaint. Now, they’ve spilled some of the beans as to why they’re so unhappy with the agency - with Live Nation’s chief operating officer John Probyn saying that they are ‘not prepared to go on as a loss maker’.
Probyn told NME: “They're public servants, so they're not allowed to say [that it was money], but it doesn’t take a genius to work out what they wanted. No promoter could go in and decently run a gig for more than we offered. I'm not prepared to go on as a loss maker. Maybe someone is going in and do something like Latitude: that may be more aesthetically pleasing to the park but [the promoter is] not going to make money out of that. The only way you’re going to do it is putting on big headline acts, selling a lot of tickets at quite a high ticket level.
“People always see the promoters as the greedy guys who take the money. Trust me, at Hyde Park we didn’t. It was our flagship venue. Hyde Park was our Madison Square Garden. The venue, the name… everybody wants to play there. Everyone did want to play there; the problem with that now is that they don’t want to play there, because of the adverse publicity it’s got.”
Probyn was not in an entirely sour mood though, and revealed that Live Nation had some other plans in the works - saying: “There’s a little project that’s been bubbling away for a while and I’m really excited about it. It’s within London, but it's completely different to Hyde Park.”
What do you think of the whole situation? Where will the 2013 Hard Rock Calling Festival take place? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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