and head of indie label Eleven Seven, envisions a Liberty “dashboard” in which customers stream via Pandora and buy tickets through Live Nation. “It’s going to take a little while to perfect, but it will be one of the single best things that happened in the music business since Spotify,” he says. New York promoter John Scher sees echoes of the late Robert Sillerman’s early-2000s SFX rollup of promoters, venues and radio in which stations promote concerts.
Regardless of how Liberty uses its music properties in tandem, owning large stakes of Live Nation, Ticketmaster, iHeartMedia, SiriusXM and Pandora could well give the company a key competitive advantage: user data. “This is what Netflix has been so great at,” notes Josh Hill, a Minneapolis investor in Liberty. “They use that data to see what’s popular, to invest in content, to make the platform more popular — which makes it worth more money.
When it comes to music, Maffei acknowledges his experience is limited. He played trombone and piano as a kid and occasionally attends concerts with newish music biz friends like Rapino, Meyer, Maverick’s Guy Oseary and Irving Azoff. He considered journalism before landing early on at investment bank Dillon Read, where, thereported, he engineered a refrigerator-company sale to Citicorp. He took over Citibank’s Pay ‘N Pak Stores and liquidated them in a year-and-a-half.
Even at home, Maffei can’t resist some competitive ribbing. His sons — the oldest is in finance, and the twins are mostly into soccer and hip-hop — like to tease him when he asks about whatever new rapper they might be streaming: “Daddy, isn’t that Billy Joel?” On one recent evening, Maffei finally had his revenge. When one of the 16-year-olds was listening to an old rock’n’roll tune, Maffei appeared out of nowhere with a characteristic quip.
Billion-dollar-company CEOs rarely respond to their enemies on social media, but Maffei tweeted: “When your opponents are wrong, they usually take the low road.” “It was something that Jim Meyer at Sirius had to go sort of clean up,” says the executive who knows Maffei well. “He had the whole industry lining up against him.”