local venues vs. national corporations: a super short op ed

You may have recently read that Live Nation is looking at opening a new music venue here in Des Moines. And even though the news is less than a week old, it's already garnering plenty of local criticism.

This afternoon, I noticed there's even a website dedicated to the opposition called Choose DSM Music. According to their mission statement,

"Live Nation/Ticketmaster and Christensen Development have submitted plans to the City of Des Moines to operate a live music venue (2,000 capacity and 800 capacity rooms) in the Argonne Armory Building in downtown Des Moines.

While we feel an addition of a music venue would be a positive one, we think bringing a corporate conglomerate like Live Nation/Ticketmaster to exclusively operate it is deeply concerning and would be harmful to the Des Moines music economy."

While I don't have many details on this proposal and while I don't really trust the media to give me an unbiased perspective, I do feel like our local venues - Wooly's or Hoyt Sherman - already do an incredible job of drawing a wide array of talent. Do we need Live Nation to come in and fix something that isn't really broken?