"Let's not sit here...Davina is a bitch."
Yesterday Ticketmaster and Facebook announced that fans are now able to “tag” their tickets to show their friends where they’re planning on sitting at the large, assigned-seating concerts, an obvious move to get those big arena concert tickets sold and keep it a bit more enticing for “fans” that want to buy their tickets close to their friends. Makes sense, I guess… >>>
Eventbrite just announced that they’ve raised another $50 million to continue on their path of offering event promoters choices in how they sell their tickets online. Here’s the news via NY Times…
Eventbrite, a ticketing start-up based in San Francisco, got its start by offering to help any event organizer peddle tickets — whether it be for a yoga class or an indie comedy show.
Now the company is looking to tackle ticketing for bigger events — and it is getting a large boost of liquid confidence from investors who think it stands a chance at stealing business from Ticketmaster, the industry giant.
On Wednesday, Eventbrite announced that it had raised $50 million in venture capital in a Series E round of financing. The influx of cash came from several firms and was led by Tiger Global. This round brings the amount of money Eventbrite has raised to a hefty $79.5 million
TechCrunch has a quite writeup of the announcement as well.
When I first heard the news today that Apple was unveiling a social network today called Ping, a new addition and feature set that’s part of iTunes 10, I was immediately wondering what partners the company was bringing on to support the tour dates part of their new Artist Pages. Among other things like showing favorite songs, recent status updates and samples of music, every artist in their database will have a “Follow” ability and a set of tour dates accompanying their profiles. All of this is going to be powered by the people that actually control most of the ticket market, Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
This was part of the press release that hit the wire soon after the new product was revealed during today’s Apple keynote… READ MORE
Photo via @crunchgear
I’m watching the Apple keynote live on USTREAM.tv and I wasn’t fully expecting that they’d be unveiling a new social network for music built right into iTunes. It’s called Ping, and it’s built into iTunes 10, which is available starting today at apple.com/iTunes. Also, as part of the iTunes Store, you’ll see Ping on your iPhones and iPod Touches. The part that caught my eye was the fact that they’ll be artist tour dates built right into the interface. It doesn’t seem like the new version is up yet but we’ll be digging right into this to find out more. Based on the presentation, there are over 17,000 tour dates in their artist database and it’s going to be easy to say “I’m going” and just post on what concerts you’re attending for all your friends to see. Can’t wait to test the implementation.
Chris Martin just took the stage for a live performance, too. More on this as it comes in…
Update: Live Nation and Ticketmaster will be powering the tour dates. Tons of links on the subject here…
blog.ticketmaster.com
Ticketmaster launched a new blog called Ticketology, and today’s first post details out a change in policy on how service fees will now be disclosed up-front when you’re purchasing tickets from the company.
We get it – you don’t like service fees. You don’t like them mostly because you don’t understand what the heck they are for. We’ll try to do a better job in this space over the coming months of helping you understand our business, and how our fees compare to others in the industry (both in ticketing and ecommerce in general). But the reality of the live entertainment business is that service fees have become an extension of the ticket price. Most of the parties in the live event value chain participate in these service fees either directly or indirectly – promoters, venues, teams, artists, and yes, ticketing companies – and service fee rebates are our largest annual expense at Ticketmaster.
They also announced that Live Nation venues will now honor a three-day return policy in advance enough of the show. This includes The Fillmore in SF, Irving Plaza in NYC, The Gorge in WA, and even Alpine Valley in WI. Go here for the full list of venues.
I’d hate to get my hopes up that this will put the company at the forefront of fan-driven decisions, but this is at least a step in the right direction.
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Were you following the news today surrounding Live Nation’s investor call at Irving Plaza? Supposedly, the company is doing just fine compared to the rest of the industry as a whole, but they expect their operating income to be down in 2010 which caused the company’s stock to slide in response. I think they were trying to inspire confidence…whoops!
Live Nation Says It Hears Ticket-Buyers “Loud And Clear” [NPR]
Executives addressed the company’s investors at Irving Plaza in New York, and acknowledged that changes will have to be made in order to prevent a further slide. President, CEO and director Michael Rapino attempted to put a positive spin on company’s position in the market, saying that Live Nation’s drop in ticket sales was smaller than the industry at large. He also insisted that “a little bit of pain” was the best thing that could happen to the industry and that the decline in the market would open the door to enforcing a “correction” in ticket prices.
Promotions like their “No Service Fees” in June signaled an absolute last-ditch effort to sell seats in order to make up some of those fixed, venue and artist contract fees, but this entire exercise is still directed at the wrong audience: the company’s investors. The real people that could care about making a difference in this company’s future would be the fans, the people that genuinely just want some cheap tickets to see the bands and music they love the most, and this company continues to do almost nothing to signal that their approach has anything to do with the fans and people that actually fill the seats. The news conference only showed more weakness in the company’s approach and they did more explaining about the money they lost and why those were in circumstances out of their control than explain the innovations and ideas they have to make the company a better and more responsive entity going forward. I hope some of the money in this industry keeps sleeping away from the big guys and starts going to more DIY fan-centric approaches to live music.
To be fair, they did try to sugarcoat this the best they could. Maybe they’ll expand internationally…maybe they’ll finally phase out ridiculous costs of printing tickets at home, something that, ahem, THEY SHOULD BE DOING ALREADY AND/OR FACTORING INTO DISCOUNTS ON TICKET PRICES BASED ON COMMON KNOWLEDGE OF ACCOUNTING PRINCIPLES AND THE IDEA THAT THE CUSTOMER IS SAVING THE COMPANY COST OF MATERIALS EXPENSES…who knows, though. I’m not sure these were the things that would excite investors given that they don’t seem to address how the company is going to cut their costs by innovating while allowing shows to sell-out more easily without having to spend a ton promoting each of them. As much as I can, I go around this now and buy tickets directly at the venues I want to see shows at. San Francisco makes this easier than most major metros, so I’m fortunate there, but going forward I’ll likely remember to continue to make that extra effort to leave out the middleman…
It’s Internet Week in New York City and the launches, announcements, and press surrounding the heavy hitters on the web will be occurring ad nauseam this week. One of the first to get my attention is the news and unveiling of Google Cloud Print with Live Nation joining the press release as one of the first partners to deploy the API’s and technology that could leverage such a service. What is Google Cloud Print, you ask? It’s exactly what it sounds like.
In Google Chrome OS, all applications are web apps. Therefore, in designing the printing experience for Google Chrome OS, we want to make sure printing from web apps is as natural as printing from traditional native apps is today. Additionally, with the proliferation of web-connected mobile devices such as those running Google Chrome OS and other mobile operating systems, we don’t believe it is feasible to build and maintain complex print subsystems and print drivers for each platform. In fact, even the print subsystems and drivers on existing PC operating systems leave a lot of room for improvement.
Our goal is to build a printing experience that enables any app (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world.
If you think that printing your tickets at home was an innovation in the industry, you could see this being an obvious step in the move race to the cloud. Immediately we can see how a company like Live Nation can get a lot out of a service like this. What if concert tickets never needed to be printed again until you get to the venue? Only then can you sell it to the highest bidder out front, which could really kill some of the secondary ticketing market. Maybe this helps the FedEx Office locations of the world by making them yet another stop when you want to get something printed, leaving the desktop printer continually and increasingly obsolete.
Live Nation says that they plan on using it to let people print out tickets, and promotions from a mobile app.
We’ll watch to see how Live Nation gets this deployed and what level of markup this will mean for us in the general ticket-buying public. If they want to stay competitive and actually show that innovation is here to help customers, this should be a reduction of the cost of ticket charges and fees that we’re used to seeing now (should being the keyword in that sentence).
The Tech and Music Industry blogs are abuzz today with a new and interesting patent that Apple has filed for a “Concert Ticket+” iPhone App for electronic ticketing. CrunchGear has a good explanation of the patent and what it purports to do:
There are a number of potential benefits to using this system. The most obvious benefit is you would no longer have to worry about losing or forgetting your ticket because the NFC technology would allow the iPhone to completely replace the paper ticket. The app would also allow you to easily transfer your tickets to others as well as access more information about the concert or event. From the business perspective, Apple’s e-ticket system would allow companies to target the ticket purchaser with live recordings, exclusive content, and concert refreshments….While none of the technology is particularly new, this system could certainly change the way we buy and use concert tickets in the future….
The idea for “ticketless” electronic ticketing via mobile phones has been floating around for a while, but it’s cool to see some more signs that bring this closer to reality. It’s also interesting to see that Apple made this move before Live Nation or Ticketmaster could lock it down, given that the newly combined Live Nation Entertainment would likely stand to gain the most from this kind of electronic ticketing. Of course, LNE is not a dominant technology company like Apple, so I guess it’s not really surprising how this played out. Either way, it’s cool to think about how this might revolutionize how we buy and use concert and event tickets.
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