The $450 million deal, announced today (Oct. 7), expands the way Pandora connects artists with listeners by tapping into the growing live music business.
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“The coming together of Pandora and Ticketfly, plus Next Big Sound, will create the most powerful fan analytics platform in the world for venues, promoters, and artists”.
While a significant player, Ticketfly is a David next to the events ticketed by Ticketmaster; and Songkick and BandsInTown already deliver a more diverse portfolio of tickets to many major music sites. Last year, Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets to over 90,000 different live events and powers more than 600 websites on behalf of its clients, which include the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland, Burning Man and the Pitchfork Music Festival, among others.
“This is a game-changer for Pandora-and more importantly-a game-changer for music”, Brian McAndrews, Pandora CEO, said in a press release statement. In its phrase, it creates “the leading data-enabled marketplace for artists and fans”.
Ticketfly was founded in 2008 and now provides ticketing and marketing software for around 1,200 music-based venues and event promoters.
So with a strong, long-term music-discovery backbone, and a whopping 80 million monthly active users, it’s easy to see how Pandora’s push into ticket sales could be a successful play for the company.
Andrew Dreskin, Ticketfly CEO and co-founder, called the two companies “a ideal fit” as they are both “extraordinarily passionate about music and improving the experience for the entire ecosystem”.
With increasing competition by companies such as Apple, Google, and Spotify, and huge transfer of revenue to the music owners, Pandora is facing much trouble with its profitability.
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.
In the ongoing battle for streaming music supremacy, Pandora may be among the oldest services, but it also has the least differentiators. Even including physical sales like CDs, the recorded music market was still a billion dollars shy of tickets. In addition, 40% of ticket sales for live events go unsold, primarily because of a “lack of awareness”.
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“For their New York date, we had an allotment of 25 percent of total tickets, which we sold out in 18 minutes”, McAndrews said.
