IN the last month Bruce Springsteen played for the president’s inauguration and the half-time crowd at the Superbowl.

The rock legend has long been America’s people’s champion. But has there ever been a worse time to mess with the man they call The Boss? Two of America’s biggest music companies are about to find out as they pursue a merger he is arguing will create “a near monopoly” in concert ticketing.

The rumoured merger of the world’s No 1 concert promoter, Live Nation, and Ticketmaster, the largest ticketing agency, looks set to be the first big test of President Barack Obama’s attitude to mergers and acquisitions. Lawyers believe Obama will be far stricter than his predecessor about what will pass the government’s tests.

“I think it’ll get a much harder look than under the Bush administration,” said Marc Schildkraut, an attorney with Howrey in Washington.

Neither company is commenting on the rumoured merger, but industry executives believe a deal could come as early as next week.

Between them the two companies dominate all sides of the live-concert business. Live Nation represents stadium-filling acts including Madonna and U2, and after a huge spending spree signing new artists the firm is three times the size of its nearest competitor.

It is the world’s largest producer of live concerts, annually staging over 16,000 gigs for 1,500 artists at big venues.

Ticketmaster’s share of the concerts market in the US is close to 70%, according to Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel Nico-laus. In 2007, Ticketmaster sold roughly 141m tickets world-wide with a gross transaction value of some $8.3 billion (£5.6 billion). Last year Ticketmaster bought Front Line Management, which handles more than 200 acts, including the Eagles and Christina Aguilera.

Analysts and antitrust lawyers said one area regulators would scrutinise would be Live Nation’s recent entry into ticket selling as the only serious competitor to Ticketmaster.

“The impetus behind the merger would be to limit competition,” said Devitt. “It’s pretty clear that these two firms were on a collision course if they remained independent.”

On his website last week Springsteen said he was “furious” with what he sees as the “abuse of our fans and our trust by Ticketmaster”.

The singer’s ire was sparked after fans had trouble buying concert tickets for a show in his native New Jersey. The fans were redirected to TicketsNow. com, a ticket resale site owned by Ticketmaster, where $95 tickets were being offered for up to $5,350.

“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 wrote. “If you, like us, oppose that idea, you should make it known to your representatives.”

Springsteen said the New Jersey attorney-general was investigating the ticket sales. Other attorneys-general, including Connecticut’s Richard Blumen-thal, have also raised concerns about the possible merger.

While the two are not direct competitors except in ticketing, and Live Nation remains small in that area, the Obama administration is “likely to be more concerned about vertical mergers than the Bush administration”, said Schildkraut.

As the music labels have increasingly struggled with their digital futures, Live Nation has taken to describing itself as “the future of the music business”.

The firm has offered staggering upfront payments for its “360 deals” where it shares concert revenues, merchandise and recorded-music sales with the artists. Madonna signed a $120m deal for 10 years. Rapper Jay-Z signed on for $150m and Shakira is believed to have cut a deal of between $70m and $100m.

But the firm has so far had trouble making its cash back. U2 cashed in their Live Nation shares, pocketing a guaranteed $25m, even though the value of the shares had fallen to around $6m. In 2007, the company made a loss of almost $12m on $4.2 billion in revenue and its stock price was this week down to around $5, well off its $24.95 high in 2007.

Ticketmaster's cash machine would go a long way to smoothing out those big buys. But first there’s The Boss to deal with.

Ticketmaster’s chief executive, Irving Azoff, apologised to Springsteen last week.

In a letter he promised: “We will do better going forward.”

But thanks to its run-in with The Boss, it remains to be seen if the merger is Born to Run.

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