Audio By Carbonatix
Fortune magazine is the latest mega-media outlet to smile upon Nobody in Particular Presents, the Denver-based concert-promotion company that shook up the music industry last August when it filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Clear Channel Entertainment (“Taking on the Empire,” August 23, 2001). Since then, the fiery showbiz tale has been picked up by a cross-strata of publications, from Salon and Spin to the Wall Street Journal and Billboard, which ran an article on the suit on its front page in September. “Backstage Brawl,” showcased in the Small Business section of the February 1 edition of Fortune, marked a refreshing change of pace for a magazine that recently has devoted most of its glossy pages to sorting out the Enron scandal and the sometimes dry dynamics of a shaky economy. Representatives on both sides of the suits traded colorful jabs: Clear Channel’s Chuck Morris, named in NIPP’s suit as a defendant, dismissed the allegations as “ridiculous,” while NIPP’s Jesse Morreale likened Morris’s company to the Mafia.
While stopping short of taking sides, Fortune writer Carlye Adler clearly appreciated NIPP’s little-guy-versus-big-guy conundrum. “In Denver,” Adler wrote, “competing against Clear Channel is a little like climbing into the ring with Lennox Lewis every business day.”
Perhaps sensing that a story filled with rock-and-roll intrigue does wonders to break up all those lifeless stock-option-advice columns, Fortune editors have elevated “Backstage Brawl” to the lead piece in the magazine’s March 4 edition. Both versions of the story mention the efforts of Representatives Robert E. Andrews (D-New Jersey) and Howard Berman (D-California) to persuade the Department of Justice to investigate Clear Channel for possible anti-trust violations. The upcoming story will also include Adler’s suggestion that for NIPP, whose attorneys are still in the discovery phase, the fight could be a long one. “It can take up to eight months for a judge to rule on [anti-trust] motions,” Adler notes, “and the case may not make it to trial for two years.”
That should give the folks at NIPP plenty of time to make sure their clip file is nice and neat.
