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"The CEO of Live Nation has spoken out about the company losing the tender to stage concerts in Hyde Park.  Live Nation wrote a formal letter of complaint to the Royal Parks Agency earlier in the month over its tender and bid process for the next five-year contract to use the park for large-scale concerts, claiming that the agency was asking for an unreasonable amount of money.  Speaking to the NME, Live Nation CEO John Probyn said of the agency: &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re public servants, so they&amp;#039;re not allowed to say [that it was money], but it doesn&amp;#039;t take a genius to work out what they wanted.  &amp;quot;No promoter could go in and decently run a gig for more than we offered. I&amp;#039;m not prepared to go on as a loss maker. Maybe someone is going in and do something like Latitude: that may be more aesthetically pleasing to the park but [the promoter is] not going to make money out of that. The only way you&amp;#039;re going to do it is putting on big headline acts, selling a lot of tickets at quite a high ticket level.&amp;quot; He continued: &amp;quot;People always see the promoters as the greedy guys who take the money. Trust me, at Hyde Park we didn&amp;#039;t. &amp;quot;It was our flagship venue. Hyde Park was our Madison Square Garden. The venue, the name\u00E2\u20AC\u00A6 everybody wants to play there. Everyone did want to play there; the problem with that now is that they don&amp;#039;t want to play there, because of the adverse publicity it&amp;#039;s got.&amp;quot;  This summer the Hard Rock Calling and Wireless concerts staged by the company were marred by controversy, with Bruce Springsteen railing against organisers for cutting off his duet with Sir Paul McCartney, and the Blur and Madonna concerts also receiving complaints for what some concert-goers saw as unacceptably low volume levels. Probyn also revealed that plans were already afoot to move the Wireless festival due to a conflict with the Royal Parks Agency over the &amp;quot;type of bands&amp;quot; they were attracting.  Probyn claimed: &amp;quot;If you look at this year, Drake, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna - the genre of music was not exactly what the park wants. That&amp;#039;s in terms of repetitive bass and clientele. We made that clear. So we already decided, &amp;#039;OK, if it&amp;#039;s not wanted, we&amp;#039;ll take it somewhere else&amp;#039;.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/music/summer-festivals/news/a434719/live-nation-boss-speaks-out-on-losing-contract-for-hyde-park-gigs/>