By Jim McCarthy Jan 2, 2009 0 comments

It’s Official: The Ticketmaster-uber-alles Era is Over

Not exactly news, but now that 2009 has dawned, Live Nation is no longer using Ticketmaster in its non-House of Blues venues.

Will the world change?  My answer to that is complicated, but comes down to this:  No, and it already has.

No, because Live Nation is essentially replacing one system with another, and in a way, aspires to be what Ticketmaster already is:  a reliable provider of ticketing services to their own venues and others.  It has the resources to get that done with time, especially as technology has made that feat easier.

It already has because this change is not a cause but rather a sympton.  It’s a symptom of a world where the power is gravitating away from distribution exclusivity and toward customer loyalty as the locus of power.

The widespread use of the WWW and the Internet started a process that inevitably leads to greater disaggregation of ticket sales.  In recent years, the biggest milestones on the road of showing this were:  1.  The acquisition of Tickets.com by Major League Baseball and 2.  the rise of the secondary market generally and Stub Hub as a major selling force specifically.

MLB’s acquisition of Tickets.com showed that a big organization could do its own ticketing if it chose, and it shifted the power in the marketplace in its favor versus Ticketmaster and Paciolan.  When you sell close to 100,000,000 tickets per year, you’re the one in charge, not the guy collecting payment for you.  From MLBAM’s point of view, it means that they have to listen to the ticket buyer and the baseball clubs, but not really anyone else.

The secondary market showed the whole business that the consumer is in charge in an even more direct way.  You may not like the fact that a ticket can be resold (or you might.  you should, but I’m not going to argue with you on that.), but unless you’re prepared to argue that a ticket is not a person’s property even after he or she buys it, you can’t really stop it from happening.  The argument that a person doesn’t own a ticket they’ve bought is, quite literally, unAmerican.  And if that doesn’t bother you, it’s communistic.  And if that doesn’t bother you, fine.  If you think it’s wrong for someone to give his friend at the next cubicle his tickets to tonight’s Clippers game because he’s got to work late, I don’t know what to do with you.

Anyway, where do we go from here?  I expect Live Nation to stutter step a little before getting the ticketing thing completely right, but get it right, they will.  TM obviously suffers an immediate set back in revenue, but remember that Live 2.0 is a rising tide.  The industry is poised for continued growth, though for the duration of the recession, it will be muted somewhat.

But more importantly, it sends a clear message:  if I have an outlet to buyers, I have power.  It’s not about proprietary distribution the way it used to be.  It’s about consumer attention.

But it is also true that the era in which most of us grew up, where Ticketmaster ruled and everybody else drooled over its market share but couldn’t do anything about it, is over.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Reddit
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz

Comments are closed.