News - 26/08/2017

Amazon and Ticketmaster negotiations grind to a halt

Amazon and Ticketmaster negotiations grind to a halt

"Billboard" has an interesting piece on how Amazon’s move into ticketing in the US is not going quite as swimmingly as the retail giant would have perhaps hoped. It had already tested the water in Europe with West End shows in London and gigs by acts like Elton John. Buoyed by its success here, nine months ago it began talks with Ticketmaster (which holds 80% of the US ticket market) to become a distribution partner. But its DNA of disrupting retail categories is not firing on all cylinders here, it seems. One of its big ideas is, echoing Amazon Prime, to get rid of individual service fees on tickets and instead charge customers a flat membership fee. Promoters, venues and acts who typically get a cut of such surcharges will not be so welcoming to that sort of disruption.

“The companies also have fundamentally different needs”, suggests "Billboard". “Amazon wants to shop tickets to the best shows to its customers, while Live Nation wants help hawking tickets to shows that don’t sell out immediately, incrementally moving the needle on the estimated 40-50 percent of industry inventory that goes otherwise unsold”.

A sticking point between Amazon and Live Nation (parent company of Ticketmaster) could be the former’s refusal so share purchaser data with the latter, but its sell to acts would be that it becomes a one-stop destination for fans looking to buy tickets, music and merchandise in one place (like a super-charged D2C store).

Not everyone is swayed by this logic. "There's a bit of technology arrogance", is how one live music source quoted in the piece puts it. "The attitude is, 'You should want to sell your tickets on Amazon because we're really good at selling things'".

Source: Billboard – http://tinyurl.com/ydcxubyc

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