AZOFF NAMED TO
CLEAR CHANNEL BOARD
Azoff is, of course, the executive chairman of concert-promotion kingpin Live Nation Entertainment and a personal manager whose acts include The Eagles, Christina Aguilera and Neil Diamond, among others.
His appointment to the Clear Channel board follows last week's resignation of Barry Diller as Chairman of LIve Nation's board of directors, a move that both parties said was expected after the intergration of Diller's Ticketmaster with Live Nation, whose merger was approved in January.
Azoff fills a seat vacated by the resignation of Kent R. Weldon, a principal at THL Partners, the private equity firm that, along with Bain Capital, owns Clear Channel. Weldon stepped off the board to make room for Azoff, who was appointed by THL to the board.
THL and Azoff have done business before. In 2005, the Boston private-equity firm and THL-owned Warner Music Group backed Azoff’s Front Line Management bid to consolidate music-management firms under a single umbrella. In 2007, when Ticketmaster acquired a stake in that business, Azoff became the chief executive of Ticketmaster Entertainment.
In 2005, at the same time Azoff was acquiring management firms, Clear Channel spun off Live Nation into a separate company. A year later, THL and Bain announced a deal to take Clear Channel private in an $18 billion transaction. Since then, the media company has struggled under its $19.5 billion debt load and a persistent advertising drop but has since shown signs of a turnaround through cost cuts, debt refinancings and operational improvements.
