James Tugman's COMM 101 Blog

Source: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2014/10/-live-nation-posts-solid-q3-financials.html

 I chose this particular article to see if I was able to apply my management and operational accounting knowledge I’ve learned from COMM 101 to a real world scenario. Sadly this was not the case.

The data provided in this article strictly covers the revenue changes for Live Nation in the past quarter. There is no mention of changes in their fixed or variable costs, the rate in which their sunk costs are amortized, or even changes in management. Although they saw an 11% increase on total revenue, I wasn’t even able to find their quarterly profits despite being a publicly traded company. Much of the data on the data on their income and cashflows statement are omitted as well. I’m sure there is a reason for this that I might learn about later in COMM 101, but I still found disheartening that I wasn’t able to financially evaluate a company I’m interested in. Because of the lack of key data in the article, I wasn’t able to take the article seriously or really understand where Live Nation sits in the live entertainment industry.

From reading this article, I feel as though I have developed a better understanding of  how news outlets can create an image of a certain company’s financial performance by including certain stats and omitting others. I’m sure if Hypebot released their cost increases or the revenue increases of their competitors like SFX entertainment, the article wouldn’t shed such a positive light on Live Nation.