Concert promoter Live Nation reported Q3 earnings yesterday. (Also available is a PDF of the earnings release.) Revenue in the quarter was $1.51 billion worldwide, a 0.5% increase, and $785 million in North America, a 6.4% decrease.

However, the company touted 30% growth in amphitheater Adjusted OIBDAN (part of which was due to booking less depreciation). In addition, Live Nation frequently touted its signing of Madonna as the starting point of its new Artist Nation segment, and it alerted of an upcoming announcement about its ticket-selling strategy when its contract with Ticketmaster expires at the end of 2008.

OIBDAN, rarely utilized in public company accounting circles, stands for operating income before depreciation, amortization, non-cash compensation and expense and gain on disposition of assets. It is a measure that gauges core operating performance and is favored by Clear Channel, which spun off Live Nation in 2005.

Live Nation's OIBDAN was $95 million in Q3 2007, an 8.5% improvement year-over-year. Operating margin 6.6%, a big improvement over last year's 1.4%.

Turning around its core amphitheater business has been one of the company's main goals. In Q3, Live Nation pulled in 5% more per head in food and beverage, and it reduced by 67 (22%) the number of events with fewer than 7,500 attendees (excluding Ozzfest).

On the company's new Artist Nation division: "Already this division has over 300 employees focused on providing the services to artists to monetize their diverse rights outside of the tour while leveraging Live Nation’s global distribution and marketing platform. We expect to manage this infrastructure in a cost efficient manner as our limited artist roster and already strong platform provide us with an additional cost advantage over our competition."

One its online initiatives: "We expect that our online strategy will be supercharged once we are able to direct fans looking for tickets to our shows to our website. As a precursor to that impact - through September 30, we sold over $3.2 million of inventory online which drove increased traffic to our North American website (unique visitors through September 2007 to www.livenation.com were up 58% over last year) and enabled us to reduce the size of our local North American sales force by approximately 30. We expect to soon make an announcement regarding the path we plan to pursue with respect to ticketing as our contract with Ticketmaster for the bulk of our North American venues expires at the end of 2008."