“The combination of Ticketfly and Pandora will be a marketing and event discovery powerhouse, giving venues and promoters unprecedented access to a massive and targeted audience of almost 80 million music fans”.
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Ticketfly on the other hand, reaps its revenue from providing a ticketing platform, along with cloud-based, integrated social-marketing services for small events and venues.
“This is a game-changer for Pandora – and much more importantly – a game-changer for music”, said Brian McAndrews, chief executive officer at Pandora.
But getting into a new industry dominated by a company with decades of experience nevertheless has left investors concerned about Pandora’s direction, and what it deal may say about its long-standing Internet radio service.
Pandora; a pioneer in the streaming music industry, has gained further popularity, thanks to new entrants like Apple Music and Spotify. They say that is because fans often don’t know that artists they like are in town, something they hope to remedy.
At $450 million, Pandora paid 8 times annual revenue for $55 million, according to reports. “With Ticketfly, we will thrill music lovers and lift ticket sales for artists as the most effective marketplace for connecting music makers and fans”. The move is the company’s latest in efforts to create an integrated music platform for users, artists and event managers.
Last year it launched a marketing platform for artists, followed this year by an audio messaging service artists can use to deliver messages to fans. It also worked with the electronic music duo Odesza, boosting the profile of a group not almost as well known as the Stones. Buy comparison, San Francisco-based Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets in 2014 to 90,000 events for a value of more than $500 million in transactions. It reached over 79.4 million active listeners in the second quarter this year, beating revenue expectations at 285.6 million, a 30% YoY (year over year) growth, compared to the expected $283 million.
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Ticketfly says that a few 14 million people each month go to one of its sites. Pandora stock traded down, 5.23% to $20.83 as at 12:32 PM EDT in New York.
