Ticketmaster and Facebook have announced a new joint venture between these two industry-leading companies, where fans will be able to buy tickets from Ticketmaster directly through Facebook’s user interface. According to the announcement, the service will be rolled out as soon as the end of April 2016. Due to a “growing number of mobile-addicted fans,” desktop and tablet ticket transactions have been declining in recent years. Through this “tie-up,” Ticketmaster hopes that it will create a more “seamless transaction” between mobile users and Ticketmaster. The arrangement is also anticipated to create big benefits for Facebook, because it will help Facebook attract more young users while it gains a cut of each ticket sale.
While this development could be seen as a positive move for creating wealth in the economy and in the music industry as a whole by generating ticket sales, to this author, it feels more collusive than collaborative. Ticketmaster, which is under the auspices of Live Nation, has already been criticized for monopolizing the concert ticketing market and has even fallen under attack for antitrust claims related to its ticket reselling service. While I love the idea of people being able to buy concert tickets more easily, this move by Ticketmaster and Facebook seems more like a move to manipulate the characteristics of social media-loving mobile users who often click before they think.
Learn more about the deal here.
Jennifer Marr is an Entertainment and Sports Highlight Contributor for the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law and a current first year student at Harvard Law School (Class of 2018).
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