FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
March 28, 2007
Ticketmaster Joins the Club
The fan club business, that is. As Reuters reported this week, Ticketmaster bought a majority stake in echomusic, a music marketing outfit in Nashville. It sounds like echomusic will soon be doing for Ticketmaster what Musictoday (profiled in the Feb issue of FC) is doing for Live Nation. Operating paid online fan communities. Selling concert tickets and merchandise from artist sites directly to fans. Finding creative ways to nurture that artist-fan relationship.
Ticketmaster's core business may be selling tickets, but like Live Nation, it recognizes that in order to survive it has to explore new services and sources of revenue, including ones it once considered threatening. Several years ago, when an upstart named Musictoday encouraged artists to sell tickets directly to fans, a shortcut perfected by the Grateful Dead, the ticketing giant resisted. That was then. Now, as David Marcus, Ticketmaster's vice president of music, told me, "We are a big believer in the value of online fan clubs."
Even more so with a stake in echomusic. In addition to letting artists sell 10 percent of tickets through industry leader Musictoday, Ticketmaster can sell as many tickets as it wants through its echomusic clubs, without losing any fees. It can also allow club members to resell tickets, a service that Ticketmaster added last year to stave off competition from the likes of eBay and StubHub. Smart move.
It's too soon to know how the deal will affect the industry's most anticipated face-off between the largest concert promoter and the largest ticket seller. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster contract expires next year. But it's safe to say this makes the negotiations even more interesting.
Posted by Chuck Salter at March 28, 2007 5:26 PM | Category: |
1 Comments
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Hmmm have you actually visited the Echo Music sites?
Apart from a few flashy pictures they seem to be a very cookie cutter solution to 'fan' sites.
The problem with re-using templates is well...they look like templates.
The few that I just visited looked a little sparse in actual attendance from fans - no real community apart from text forums.
Yes I have a hidden agenda (www.mexuar.com provides click to talk technology mainly used for click to talk advertising or click to talk customer support from company web pages but we also have a number of user communities using our software for 24x7 voice driven chat sessions).
My point is that text forums are ok but in the days of myspace, facebook, radio handi they are hardly what constitutes community forums.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
dean@mexuar.com