LiveDaily

» see livedaily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A ticketing company with a newsroom inside it is an American structure. In Turkey the ticketing company was Biletix, which sold you the ticket and employed no reporters, and which carries the Ticketmaster name here now. LiveDaily was the other model, where the company taking your booking fee also told you which bands were touring.

The site was created in 1998 under Ticketmaster ownership and it ran for twelve years across North America and the United Kingdom. The obvious cynical reading is that it existed to move inventory, and the obvious cynical reading is not wrong. It is also not the whole thing.

The work was real enough that outside newsrooms borrowed it. MTV News cited LiveDaily reporting and so did the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. By October 2008 the site was claiming close to a million visitors a month, which means that somewhere along the way a promotional channel had turned into a music desk people read on purpose.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

Traffic came for one of two things. A tour routing before anyone else had it, or the forums, which were the older half of the site and the half with people in it. Threads had been running for years about bands and, in the way of message boards, mostly about each other.

LiveDaily Sessions, announced in October 2008, put touring acts in a room and filmed them, with a bias toward acts nobody had booked into an arena yet. That was Ticketmaster spending money to build demand for the smaller half of its own inventory. Sensible for a ticketing company, and rare enough that it is worth naming.

~ three days in may ~

The forums closed on 18 May 2010 for business reasons that were never given. Publication stopped three days later and the front page carried one line, LiveDaily takes its final bow.

By 24 May the editorial team had announced SoundSpike, a new site promising the same coverage, which means the staff had been told early enough to have something ready. Ticketmaster itself never explained. The company had completed its merger with Live Nation on 25 January that year, four months before, and a newsroom is the kind of line item that does not usually survive that arithmetic. That is inference and it should be read as inference, because no reason was ever put on the record.

~ what came after ~

The forum regulars regrouped at AfterLD.com, because that is what forum regulars do. The domain is a broker's for-sale page now. SoundSpike ran for a while and then stopped, and in 2026 soundspike.com serves a blank white page with the logo centered in the middle of it and nothing else on it at all.

livedaily.com does not answer. The last front page survives in the archive, captured on 24 May 2010 with the farewell line still up. Twelve years of tour announcements and interviews are readable only through the Wayback Machine, which is where most of that decade's music press ended up.

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