The previous time I checked, there was no archive of Tuesday's Senate hearing on the proposed Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger. Nor is there yet a transcription available to the public. But the full hearing can now be streamed from the Senate Committee on the Judiciary's page for the hearing.

I wanted to go back to the a portion of the hearing when Irving Azoff subtly singled out artists and promoters as parties that benefit from ticket fees and sales on the secondary market. Here are Azoff's words (starting at about 1:07 in the webcast):

In a perfect world, I would personally hope that there would be a more accurate, transparent primary (market) that would do away with the need for any secondary (market) whatsoever.

You should also understand that Ticketmaster does not control what tickets go on sale and what tickets don't go on sale. There are tickets held by various parties throughout the business and these tickets are generally the ones that end up on the secondary sites.

Azoff was then asked by Senator Amy Klobuchar if the merger would lower ticket prices and pointed to data that indicates previous mergers have no lowered ticket prices. He took the opportunity to outline the various recipients of service fees.

I would also like to get on the record that when people hear what Ticketmaster's service charge is, Ticketmaster was set up as a system where they took the heat for everybody. Ticketmaster gets a minority percentage of that service charge. In that service charge are the credit card fees, the rebates to the buildings, rebates sometimes to artists, sometimes rebates to promoters.

Both are very important points in the hearing, and both here left out not only the Wall Street Journal's liveblogging post but every report of the hearing I have read. When I first saw the hearing, these statements stood out. Azoff wanted these items to be part of public record, and he opened the door to an examination of what artists and promoters get out of ticket prices.

What Azoff is pointing out is important to any discussion on ticket prices and secondary ticketing services: A portion of the hated service fees are going directly to the parties (some of them artists) who also re-sell blocks of tickets on the secondary market and allow for Ticketmaster to shoulder all public criticism.

If the Senators are truly concerned about prices and want to grant music fans a better opportunity to purchase tickets at face value, they will address those blocks of tickets that escape the primary market.