Pandora Acquires Ticketfly For $450m In A Bid To Sell Tickets To Live Music Shows
by Matt Burns ( @mjburnsy)
TechCrunch
October 7, 2015
Pandora has a new tool in its belt to fight against Apple Music and Spotify. The music streaming just announced it will purchase Ticketfly, a TicketMaster-type site, for $450m in cash and stock. Pandora says in a press release that Ticketfly’s service will allow Pandora listeners to better find live music events.
It’s unclear at this point how deep the Ticketfly integration will go.
“This is a game-changer for Pandora – and much more importantly – a game-changer for music,” said Brian McAndrews, chief executive officer at Pandora, in a released statement today. “Over the past 10 years, we have amassed the largest, most engaged audience in streaming music history. With Ticketfly, we will thrill music lovers and lift ticket sales for artists as the most effective marketplace for connecting music makers and fans.”
Ticketfly currently works with 1,200 venues and event promoters in North America. The service primarly focuses on live music although briefly dabbled in sporting events as well.
This is the latest in Pandora’s quest to stay at the top of the music streaming battle. Last month, at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015, Pandora co-founder and chief strategy officer Tim Westergren took the stage with our own Josh Constine to talk about Pandora’s unique model in the very competitive music space.
“Over time, clearly people prefer what Pandora does. It’s important to know that there are two ingredients,” he said. “A big part of Pandora is the music genome project — that’s a hand-built database. They spend days headphones on, listening to songs and manually tagging them.”
It’s likely that Pandora will use this extensive data set to attempt to sell tickets through Ticketfly to events it knows listeners will enjoy.
techcrunch.com |
