Seems like all the major media and entertainment companies are getting in the “community” spirit these days. With Sports Illustrated buying Takkle and Fan Nation, CBS buying MaxPreps (story here)…and now Ticket Master buying Echomusic (read story here)
Article mentions SPORTS as a target market for Ticketmaster communities
From Tennessean.com
Artists, fans to benefit
For artists who use Echomusic’s services, the immediate upside of the deal is that it offers more avenues through which to market their fan Web sites and ultimately sell more tickets. Also, an artist’s most ardent fans probably will benefit from exclusive access to tickets.
For example, Ticketmaster partnered with Apple’s iTunes service to offer customers who pre-ordered recent albums from Bob Dylan and the Red Hot Chili Peppers the first crack at buying concert tickets. Moriarty said it’s possible to imagine similar deals with Echomusic’s artist clients.
“We’ll look for any and all opportunities to leverage Echo’s (technology) platform,” he said.
But asked whether any of Echomusic’s customers thought the deal tied their fan sites perhaps too closely with Ticketmaster, Montgomery said, “Some of our key relationships were tested and asked what they thought. And at the end of the day, they trust me and my judgment.”
The companies also are hoping that the deal expands Echomusic’s customer list far beyond Music Row into other genres such as rock, rap and pop, as well as sports. Ticketmaster signed an exclusive contract last month with the National Basketball Association to become the league’s official ticket reseller in hopes of going deeper into sales with that market.
“Anywhere in entertainment where someone is trying to engage deeply with their audience, Echo’s got a great application,” Moriarty said. “We’ve got 9,000 clients in 20 countries, and that’s a very big pond to fish in for Mark (Montgomery) and his team here.”
My Comments on strategy
In general, this seems like a solid move for Ticketmaster. If it can find ways to help artists sell more tickets to fans, and position itself in the middle, then it has done its job. In the end, that’s what Ticketmaster’s core business is…helping entertainment brands gain ticket distribution more efficiently, and making a buck on ticket transactions. But transactions and relationships are two different things.
Any artist or team that needs to SELL more tickets will likely be wooed by this siren’s call. It might be perfect for the “long tail” of the entertainment business (i.e. unknown artists which niche followings), but not sure it makes as much sense for bigger entities. And in the end, how will fans react?
I think it may be easy for BIGGER entertainment brands to jump on board with this program before considering the long term implications. With E commerce and E Community and search technologies getting better and cheaper all the time, seems to me the technology platform is the easy part. The harder part is the customer relationship management.
We need to make sure we we build deeper relationships with our fans and expand our business by reaching more fans who will never buy tickets. Ticketmaster is aptly named. It is a ticket broker. That’s what it does REALLY well.
But our business will be less and less about ticket transactions as we move further into this digital age, and we need to make sure we invest in technology that is flexible and can help us manage the 360-degree customer experience, beyond mere ticket sales. At very least, our ticketing data needs to be seamlessly integrated with all of our other data.
It will be interesting to see if Ticketmaster is able to integrate its newly purchased “community” technologies into its ticketing engine and improve the customer TOTAL experience, or if it will remain JUST about transactions.
