Sport Finance
Essays

Ticket prices for professional sporting events are affected by several additional factors such as the size, level of affluence, and demographic composition of the sports teams' markets, as well as the prices charged for concessions, parking and most especially athlete salaries and other payments which account for most sports teams' costs. To determine how these factors have negatively affected professional sports in recent years, this paper provides a review of the relevant peer-reviewed and scholarly literature concerning ticket prices and athlete salaries, followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.

This paper is supposed to be about sport finance. The prompt is about unwinding a sports business operation. There was not much information about that subject to really what we've got here is some general material on unwinding a business and a fair bit of repetition as well, for what it's worth.

Analyzing the Live Nation brand needs to start with the experience customers have when they purchase tickets and attend concerts. The value of live events is in how effectively there are promoted and how easily customers can quickly gain access to tickets, ticket packages and entire entertainment packages. Live Nation's branding has concentrated more on the performers, less on the experience, and have also not paid attention to the mobility factors including having a solid smartphone and table strategy (Tabitha, Hede, Rentschler, 2009). While the actual events the company produces and delivers are exceptional, the experiences of booking them are often problematic and require personal assistance from telephone service centers and customer service representatives. The more complex the event, the more manual the process becomes within Live Nation. After analyzing their financial statement, this fact became clear; the more gross margin they generate the higher their costs of sales. The hard reality for Live Nation is that the more attractive or exclusive the event, the more challenging they become to buy from. From a branding perspective, this is exactly the opposite of what they want to achieve. The essence of entertainment branding is a solid foundation of setting accurate, realistic customer expectations and then deliberately exceeding them on every fact of the experience, beginning with ticket purchased, through getting to and attending the event and the memories that have been formed as a result (Pihlström, Brush, 2008). Entertainment brands grapple with a particularly challenging set of circumstances, as the brand must reflect the overall experience and identity of the business while also managing to define and execute against expectations effectively (Hemphill, 2003). Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the areas of mobility platforms and support for multiple marketing and selling channels (Verkasalo, 2011). Live Nation has failed to capture the full value of mobility platforms for entertainment, and as a result is in danger of seeing their entire business model become obsolete. The advent of mobility-based branding that supersedes and becomes even more strategically important than off-line (print) and online presence via websites was predicted six years ago and is today gathering momentum quickly (Vlachos, Vrechopoulos, Pateli, 2006). For Live Nation to retain and grow its customer base and also fend off competitors, it will need to concentrate on its mobility strategy not at the event level as it does today, but from a platform perspective, just as the company has done with the Web in the past (Okazaki, Barwise, 2011). For Live Nation the future requires that they make the brand part of the experience itself; today they are disjointed in a very competitive, turbulent market.