Posted on 01/17/2008 12:01:58 PM PST by weegee
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Top box office service Ticketmaster said on Tuesday that it would buy TicketsNow Inc, a Web site that resells tickets to concerts and sports events, in a bid for a stronger foothold in the secondary tickets market.
Ticketmaster, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp that will be spun off into an independent company later this year, expects the deal to close by the end of the first quarter.
Ticketmaster said it planned to build a site allowing customers to review and compare ticket pricing in the primary, premium and resale markets.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but a report in The Wall Street Journal said the deal was worth $265 million.
Secondary ticket sales have grown into a recognized business from what was once a gray market controlled by scalpers outside of sports and music venues, allowing companies to reap premiums on events that are in high demand.
Online auction site eBay owns the largest online resale vendor, StubHub, which last year reached a deal to be the official online ticket reseller for Major League Baseball.
Ticketmaster is seeking new revenue streams as top client, concert promoter Live Nation Inc, ends a long-term ticketing agreement between the two companies and begins to offer its own box office service in 2009.
Live Nation said last week it also viewed the ticket resale market as an important opportunity for growth.
IAC shares fell 2.3 percent to $23.85 on Nasdaq.
Rock and Roll PING!
It is officially over. The dirty little secret about getting “great seats” has always been that the front rows are rarely entered into the computer for general sale the say the tickets are put on sale. They are often set aside for “promotional” purposes and amazingly a good number of those always work their way to scalping agencies. You stand a better chance of getting those tickets for face value the day of the show at Ticketmaster than the months before that (where you will only find tickets in the back of the area in the computer).
Pink Floyd got out of the stadium concert business in the 1970s when they realized how many thousands of seats at each show were being sold by the promoter without being “sold” (they never appeared as ticket receipts).
So now Ticketmaster has a personal profit motive to encourage scalping. Wonderful.
These are generally civic owned venues. At the Astrodome, there was a national scalper who worked out of the “front office” (I read a profile on him in the Cleveland paper).
The only motion there ever is in Houston to block “scalping” is when the ticket agencies are caught selling Houston Rodeo concert tickets comped by the promoters themselves.
Talk about a scam. These jerks take a lot of the better tickets out of circulation before things even go on sale and then steer folks to the scalping agency they are affiliated with and will soon be tied together with. I hate those crooks and their gigantic fees and their corrupt practices. I hate to see news of companies going under during this crisis but reading about TicketMaster collapsing would bring tears of joy to my eyes.
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