Pandora Media, Inc. has entered into an agreement to buy Ticketfly – a Ticketmaster competitor that sold 16 million tickets to live events in 2014, which translates to more than $500 million in transaction volume.
Advertisement
Pandora co-founder and chief executive of Ticketfly Andrew Dreskin says the two companies are a flawless fit.
“We believe Ticketfly would complement Pandora’s business nicely, with revenue synergies from increasing the density of connections among artists, venue operators, and event promoters that can all leverage the marketing data generated by 80 million + Pandora listeners”.
Pandora has long used listener data to suggest music for – and target ads at – its users through its stations.
Pandora will be buying Ticketfly for $450 million, a few of which will come in the form of cash and others in stock.
Pandora is huge, with more than 80 million monthly active users, but is yet to turn a profit. He said the acquisition will benefit music lovers as well as ticket sales for artists. At the same time it’s moving to align itself with the biggest moneymaking opportunity left in music: live events.
The acquisition is the latest move by Pandora to stay at the top of the competition and to achieve its mission of connecting artists and fans by both ear buds or live on stage.
Even before it bought Next Big Sound, Pandora was already focused on building out its own artist-focused tools, starting with last year’s launch of the Pandora Artist Marketing Platform (cutely shortened to “AMP”).
Ticketfly’s main business, and the source of Pandora’s interest, is with smaller venues and independent artists because that’s where most concert tickets are sold, Egbert said.
Between Ticketfly’s website and network of client sites, it drags in an average of 14 million visitors a month. North American concert ticket sales grew 22% past year, pouring into an industry estimated at around $6.2 billion.
Advertisement
“Attending a live show is powerful, and we want to make it easier for all music fans to enjoy live music”. I’ve been at this for eight years, and at no time have I ever been more excited about our ability to deliver on our vision to reimagine live events than I am now, with Pandora as our partner.
