Perhaps in an effort to challenge audio bootlegs and video taken on camera phones, Live Nation and Apple have teamed to provide concert footage via iTunes.

Apple’s iTunes will have a section featuring the concerts of about 20 artists ranging from Jesse McCartney to Ziggy Marley, when the service begins, the companies said in a statement. They expect hundreds of more shows in the coming months. Prices will start at about $7.99.

Los Angeles-based Live Nation will produce most of the offerings from the more than 20,000 concerts it promotes each year. The company has reached licensing rights deals for live performances with major label owners and artists to enable a smooth launch of the service, it said.

Eh, there’s something enticing about a shaky (and probably illegal) video recorded by the average concert attendee. Plus, I don’t have to pay to watch it on YouTube.

Earlier this year, Ticketmaster and Live Nation attempted to merge companies. Since Ticketmaster is the largest ticketing distributer in the country, one could understand why the Justice Department would balk at a union with Live Nation, a huge concert promoter. Smaller production companies feel they would lose out on events if this deal goes through. They’re right, of course. The merger would create a ticketing powerhouse, one that has the ability to simultaneously sell and promote their own events. Negotiations may be starting back up in Washington, but they’re also receiving harsh criticism in the UK.

The U.K.’s Competition Commission issued a provisional ruling on Thursday that the union of the L.A.-based firms “could severely inhibit the entry of a major new competitor, CTS Eventim, into the U.K. ticketing market.”

The commission’s ruling echoes objections of witnesses who assailed the merger as anticompetitive at U.S. congressional hearings early this year.

Prior to the merger announcement in February, Bremen, Germany-based CTS agreed to provide ticketing for Live Nation’s British events, and it has enabled the U.S. promoter to operate a ticketing platform, which competes with Ticketmaster, in the U.S. since January.

A Live Nation-Ticketmaster alliance could erode CTS’ position in the U.K. market by cutting the number of tickets made available to the smaller firm, the commission said. “This could lead to higher net prices … and/or lower service quality or less innovation in the market,” the ruling stated.

Ticketmaster is one of the most hated companies in the world. They’re the schmucks that invented the 40 percent surcharge to see your favorite band. This deal wouldn’t benefit anybody but the companies. The bands, fans, and independent operators would all get screwed.

I never understood why venues didn’t just sell tickets exclusively in-house. I know you can buy tickets at the box office, but why can’t you also order them online? The venue would only have to hire a couple more employees to process the orders and send out the tickets. They’d tack on a surcharge to pay the staff, but it wouldn’t be as monstrous as they one utilized by Ticketmaster.

There has to be better way!

Mega promoter Live Nation announced today that they will waive service fees for lawn seats at Live Nation-sponsored concert ampitheaters on all tickets purchased this Wednesday, with plans to offer similar deals on Wednesdays throughout the summer:

“We know the fan has been frustrated by the series of successive fees in the purchase process,” Live Nation Ticketing CEO Nathan Hubbard tells Billboard.biz. “There is attrition in the sales flow once you see your third page with some additional fees. The fan told us they just want to know up front how much the cost of the experience is going to be. We didn’t address that problem completely, but the first step was moving from fans paying a service fee — you might pay a shipping and handling fee, maybe a print-at-home fee, delivery fee, etc. — to consolidating it into a single up-front fee that is there as you cart your inventory.”

A noble gesture on the surface, but not quite as magnanimous as it might appear. After all, as you can see in the quote above, this is the company that has the nerve to make ticket buyers pay for the privilege of printing their own tickets. Let’s examine this supposed treat for the fans a little more closely, shall we?

Live Nation is running this promotion on Wednesdays. Most concert tickets go on sale Saturday morning, and if there is any chance of a same-day sellout (take Green Day’s upcoming tour, for example), no fan is going to wait another five days in order to save ten bucks. No one, of course, knows this better than Live Nation.

The only service fees being waived are lawn seats. This means that the diehard fans of an artist or band, who will naturally want to be as close to the stage as possible, will continue to get boned at the usual rate, while the casual fans of that artist – who are presumably on the fence about attending the show, otherwise they would have bought their tickets the day they went on sale – will benefit. While it would stand to reason that the diehards are the ones that deserve to be rewarded, in fairness to Live Nation, this is right in line with record labels’ tendency to market their wares to the people who are least likely to buy them.

Curiously, no one has discussed helping out the cash-strapped music fan by lowering the price of concert tickets. We suspect that the person who brought that up at the company meeting was tossed out the window like the guy in this Bud Light ad. Because that’s just crazy talk, son.

Does anyone like Ticketmaster or Live Nation? Will anyone shed a tear if the government steps in a prevents a merger? Jon Fine argues in BusinessWeek that opposing the merger is a political lay-up for the Obama administration.

If there is a political downside to doing so, neither I nor anyone I talked to can discern it. Here you have not one but two companies that are despised, be it for high ticketing fees or tight control of what was once an exquisitely local business, by a large portion of their key customers. (That group includes a sizable contingent of youngish music fans who likely skew Obama-ward in their politics, to boot.) How despised are these companies? One is commonly referred to as TicketBastard, as a simple Web search shows. Historically, this is possibly the one that was hated less. Live Nation changed its name from Clear Channel Entertainment in 2005, when that name was provoking frothing at the mouth. (It’s telling that the combined entity would be called Live Nation Entertainment; representatives declined to make Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation who would maintain that role in the proposed new company, available for comment.)

The merger is valued at $2.5 billion and the surviving company will be called Live Nation Entertainment.

The deal is subject to the usual legal issues, including regulatory review, and there’s sure to be some pressure against it from the music industry and others who see this consolidation as a threat.

—Management: A lot of ego to fit into one space … Barry Diller, chairman of Ticketmaster Entertainment, will be chairman of the board with Michael Rapino, now CEO of Live Nation, as CEO and president, and Irving Azoff, now CEO of Ticketmaster, as executive chairman and CEO of Front Line.

—The name change: Dropping the Ticketmaster brand in favor of Live Nation could be the first step toward distancing the new company from the negative press surrounding the long-standing ticketing giant. A WSJ source said management wants to diminish the impression that the “company is out to gouge” consumers—as concert-goers have long complained about the service fees Ticketmaster tacks on to ticket prices.

It will be interesting to see if this passes the anti-trust test. I suspect they will have some trouble, but who knows.

The news is coming at a time when Ticketmaster is struggling with some bad press following the Springsteen ticket fiasco.

Bruce Springsteen has responded to his fans’ outcry following Ticketmaster’s problem-laden sale of his Working on a Dream tour tickets earlier this week. Countless fans reported technical malfunctions during the onsale, while others complained that Ticketmaster forwarded them to the company’s secondary ticket site, TicketsNow, even though seats were still available through Ticketmaster. The New Jersey Attorney General has also announced an investigation into the sale. Ticketmaster has since issued an apology to Springsteen, and vowed to make amends to confused fans.

“Last Monday, we were informed that Ticketmaster was redirecting your log-in requests for tickets at face value, to their secondary site TicketsNow, which specializes in up-selling tickets at above face value. They did this even when other seats remained available at face value. We condemn this practice,” Springsteen and his tour team said in a letter posted on Bruce’s official site. “We have asked this redirection from Ticketmaster to TicketsNow cease and desist immediately and Ticketmaster has agreed to do so in the future and has removed its unwanted material from their and our site.”

As for the merger, Bruce wasn’t very supportive of that idea.

Springsteen isn’t keen on the idea of a Live Nation Ticketmaster merge either. “A final point for now: the one thing that would make the current ticket situation even worse for the fan than it is now would be Ticketmaster and Live Nation coming up with a single system, thereby returning us to a near monopoly situation in music ticketing,” Springsteen writes. “If you, like us, oppose that idea, you should make it known to your representatives.”