Mergers and Acquisitions: Ex-Ticketmaster Fredric Rosen To Outbox

The Journal reports that Fredric Rosen, who served as Ticketmaster's CEO from 1982 to 1998, will head Outbox Technology Inc. Outbox, a Canadian company, will expand to the U.S. with Cirque du Soleil and work with clients to sell tickets directly to consumers. Outbox's setup is essentially the opposite of Ticketmaster's, which uses a large, centralized database to sell tickets to a variety of events, often with heavy convenience charges. "The middle-man model is dead," Rosen told the Journal. "You have to evolve."

No word on what sort of fees Outbox will have, but Rosen sees the declining ticket business - the biggest 100 concerts saw a 17 percent revenue drop in the first half of the year - as an opportunity to shatter the hegemony that he helped create.