Say what you like about American politicians, but they can’t be faulted for the effort they put into the acronyms for their legislation. The post The BOSS and SWIFT ACT draws criticism from Fix The Tix appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Concert ticketing is currently a heated political topic in the US, and now there’s another lobbying coalition joining the fray. The post Music industry bodies launch Fix The Tix ticketing coalition appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

New York-based startup POSH is having its official launch this week, but it’s already been building up a head of steam. The post Event management and ticketing startup POSH raises $5m funding appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Pressure on Live Nation and its Ticketmaster business from US politicians isn’t letting up, led by Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal. The post US senators target Ticketmaster with Unlock Ticketing Markets Act appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Google is on the wrong end of a new court ruling in France over advertisements for unauthorised secondary ticketing services. The post FEAT hails French ruling over unauthorised secondary ticketing appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ticketing firm Dice is keeping itself busy, with an extension of one of its venue deals in the UK, and a new chief business officer. The post Dice extends Troxy deal and hires new chief business officer appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Owners of rock band Avenged Sevenfold’s ‘Death Bat Club’ NFTs are getting early access to concert tickets, via Ticketmaster. The post Ticketmaster offers pre-sales to Avenged Sevenfold NFT owners appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Dice’s latest partnership is with Spanish clothing retailer Bershka. ‘Moved by Music’ will encompass events, artists and playlists. The post Dice and Bershka team up for ‘Moved by Music’ campaign appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Secondary ticketing firm StubHub has been coming in for some criticism this month, from Live Nation and David Lowery alike. The post StubHub hits out at Live Nation’s backing for FAIR Ticketing Act appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Musician, professor and artists’ rights campaigner David Lowery has raised the alarm about a draft bill in the US state of Georgia focusing on ticketing fees. “Simply a Trojan horse bill that seems to limit artist fan clubs, indie venues and others to sell face value non-transferable tickets to fans,” is how he described it […]

Live music revenues are growing again, after the massive hit caused by Covid-19 and its resulting lockdowns. The post Live Nation: concerts are ‘one of the last experiences fans will cut back on’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

UK-based ticketing and live events firm Shoobs has published a review of 2022, noting that it supported more than 7,000 events. The post Shoobs hails 2022 as ‘The Year of Amapiano’ in UK live events appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

US president Joe Biden gave his annual State Of The Union address last night, including a couple of legislative priorities relevant to music. The post Biden talks crackdown on ticketing fees and kids’ data collection appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

There are two narratives around ticketing in the US at the moment. First, politicians piling into Live Nation / Ticketmaster… The post Ticketmaster details ‘arms race against abusive ticket scalping’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Look what you’ve made them do, Taylor Swift. ‘Them’ being the politicians on the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The post Live Nation talks bots but US politicians are talking breakup appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Front-row seats are brilliant, right? Possibly not if you’re Joe Berchtold, president and CFO of Live Nation Entertainment. The post US Senate Judiciary Committee prepares for ticketing hearing appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights has set a date for its hearing on the ticketing industry. The post US Senate will hold its Ticketmaster hearing on 24 January appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Fresh from controversy surrounding tickets for Taylor Swift’s North American tour, Ticketmaster is facing criticism in Mexico. The post Ticketmaster under fire over ticketing issues at Bad Bunny gig appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ticketmaster’s difficult end to 2022 continues. The recent on-sales for Taylor Swift’s North American tour are at the centre of it. The post Ticketmaster faces a ticketing lawsuit from Taylor Swift fans appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Live Nation has been under the spotlight since the difficulties with the ticket on-sales for Taylor Swift’s next tour. The post US senators put FTC under the microscope over ticket-buying bots appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ticketmaster’s difficult end to 2022 continues, with the company now facing a hearing in the US Senate over its business practices. The post Ticketmaster to face US Senate hearing by the end of this year appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The companies have worked together since 2019, and Dice has sold nearly half a million mobile tickets for Primavera Sound’s events in 2022. The post Dice extends its ticketing partnership with Primavera Sound appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ticketmaster has cancelled the public on-sale of tickets for next year’s US leg of Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras Tour’, with the company firmly on the defensive amid criticism from fans and politicians alike. The post Ticketmaster cancels public on-sale for Taylor Swift tour appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ticketmaster has rescheduled some of the onsales for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour, after “historically unprecedented” demand for tickets in the initial presale. The post Ticketmaster shifts Taylor Swift onsales after presale chaos appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ticketswap is one of the firms trying to build an ethical business out of ticket reselling, rather than going down the tout’s-paradise route. The post Ticketswap expands to UK (but it already has 1.5m users there) appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We first wrote about YellowHeart in 2019, when it emerged as a blockchain ticketing startup backed by EDM duo the Chainsmokers. The post YellowHeart sets its ticketing sights on the metaverse appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Live Nation and Ticketmaster completed their merger in January 2010, after receiving regulatory approvals. The post Activist groups team up for ‘Break up Ticketmaster’ campaign appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Will Page, the former Chief Economist of Spotify, and British collecting society PRS for Music, has brought together some hefty sets of data in order to map the change in UK consumer behaviour around music before, during and after the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown. The post Will Page analyses lockdown’s effect on UK music and predicts bounce-back appeared […]

The Bruce Springsteen ticket-pricing saga rumbles on, and now The Boss’s, erm, boss – manager John Landau The post Dynamic ticketing: Springsteen’s manager defends pricing appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Dutch secondary-ticketing company TicketSwap is expanding, with a swathe of new deals with festivals, venues and promoters. The post TicketSwap is expanding across Europe and Latin America appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Single Music is a startup that makes a ‘monetised video’ tool for ecommerce platform Shopify, so that artists using the latter to sell merch can also use it for ticketed livestreams. The company says that it has sold nearly a million tickets and generated more than $22m of revenue for its clients since the beginning of […]

Ticketing firm Dice has raised $122m in its Series C funding round. Venture capital giant SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 led the round, with Future Shape. The post Dice raises $122m: ‘We’re now scaling, because we’re ready for it’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Anyone looking for a reminder not to get too carried away with the NFTs bonanza would do worse to look at the fate of some of the blockchain music companies from a few years ago that had big ambitions. Big Neon for example, whose founding team included Ticketfly co-founder Dan Teree and cryptocurrency expert Riccardo […]

In 2018, ticketing startup Seated made people, ahem, sit up and take notice when it was one of the winners at the Midemlab startups contest. We reported on its winning pitch at the time, with the company working directly with artists to sell tickets to their shows, and to remind fans when they were on sale – even automatically […]

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has issued its verdict on secondary ticketing firm Viagogo’s acquisition of rival StubHub. The regulator says Viagogo will have to sell StubHub’s business outside North America, and that the CMA will have to approve the purchaser of the business before any sale can go through. The body had concluded that […]

Ticket touting has dropped out of the music industry headlines over the last nine months – unsurprisingly, given that in many countries there aren’t many tickets to tout due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But as the live industry continues its preparations for a return at scale (hopefully) later this year, so the murkier side of secondary […]

We’ve written about ToneDen a few times in recent memory: for a profile of its social and streaming marketing tools in November 2019, for example, and then a story in June this year about its ‘StreamLinks’ feature offering smart links for livestreaming events. Now the startup has been acquired by a company very much rooted in the live events […]

It’s not been smooth sailing for secondary ticketing firm Viagogo’s $4bn takeover of rival StubHub since it was announced in November 2019, thanks to regulatory investigations and Covid-19. Now Viagogo is proposing a solution that it hopes will fend off the regulators: selling StubHub’s business outside North America, while hanging on to the US and Canada […]

A lot of physical concerts have been cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s been heartening how many fans have held onto their tickets for the ones that have been postponed – even those delayed for a year or more. Now ticketing firm Lyte has developed a tool that capitalises on this loyalty in a different […]

Audio streaming service Mixcloud launched a livestreaming feature in April this year, enabling people to stream live audio or video on its platform. Today, it’s announcing an expansion of ‘Mixcloud Live’ to add ticketing. Several artists will be testing the new feature out, including Flying Lotus, Róisín Murphy and Nas (who recently invested in Mixcloud, which […]

Metalcore band Underoath are the latest artist to do something more involved with livestreaming. Underoath: Observatory is a series of three concerts, each of which will see the band playing one of their albums in full, from a venue in Florida. Tickets for each show cost $15, while a three-show ticket bundle is $45. However, each […]

Veeps! Another new livestreaming startup for artists? Actually, no, this one’s been around since 2017, and was founded by Benji and Joel Madden from rock band Good Charlotte. It’s a platform for ticketed livestreams, and the latest artist to sign up is a biggie: former One Direction star Liam Payne. He’s going to be launching […]

British regulator the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating the merger of secondary ticketing firms Viagogo and StubHub. Its latest update on the investigation isn’t good news for those companies. The CMA says it is “concerned that the loss of competition brought about by the merger could result in customers who buy and resell tickets […]

Secondary ticketing company StubHub isn’t having a good 2020, by any stretch of the imagination. Not only has the live industry shut down in many countries, but the eBay subsidiary’s planned $4bn acquisition by Viagogo has yet to see the two companies actually merge, amid regulatory investigation. Given past controversies around Viagogo and secondary ticketing more […]

When lockdown started, artists around the world swiftly jumped onto platforms like Instagram and Twitch, in order to livestream from their homes. But, with social distancing restrictions in place for the foreseeable future, and no real sense of when live music could return, the idea that livestreams could help to partially offset the enormous losses […]

Forget Fortnite: 2020’s most intense battle royale might just be between all the livestreaming-video services promising to help musicians make back at least some of the revenues they’re losing from the concerts shutdown. The latest to join the fray is US startup Yoop, which has created an ‘eSpace’ that it describes as “a new immersive virtual venue designed […]

Startups and services based on live music are having to pivot quickly (if, hopefully, temporarily) amid the Covid-19 pandemic. We wrote about ticketing app Dice’s launch of a livestreaming-focused Dice TV feature last week, and now fellow British startup Beatstream Box Office is making its own changes. The company’s main business is giving fans paid access to […]

We’ve already seen the biggest companies in the live music world, from Live Nation to Eventbrite, reveal some of their plans for cost reductions to help them get through the coronavirus crisis. What about smaller startups whose businesses are based on live music though? Ticketing app Dice is one of them, and this morning it has revealed part […]

There are plenty of ways for artists to perform concerts at home and livestream them during the current period of social distancing and self-isolation, but not quite so many ways to charge fans to watch. One recently-launched option is a startup called Side Door. Its core business is (or rather: will be, once the lockdown […]

The next big controversy around secondary ticketing has arrived, and it concerns whether buyers will get refunds for events that have been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. If they bought through StubHub, the answer is now ‘no’ in the US and Canada – unless they were bought in areas where such refunds are legally required. […]

StubHub has become one of the first ticketing firms to confirm plans to ‘furlough’ staff (the term means to put staff on mandatory leave, often unpaid – it’s not clear whether that applies here – as a temporary measure). “Given the impact of the coronavirus on the live-events industry, we have made the difficult but responsible decision […]

Audience Republic was established in 2016, three years after founder and CEO Jared Kristensen had lost $20k at a low-selling event he had put on. After three more years of organising various events, he realised that he was missing an effective solution that would help sell tickets.  The company now has offices in London, Los […]

Ticketing firm Eventbrite has withdrawn its business outlook – the predictions for revenues, profits etc that public companies provide to analysts – in the light of the coronavirus-fuelled uncertainty around the live entertainment business. CEO Julia Hartz described the situation as “unprecedented”. “The year started off strong across the board and we are now seeing a […]

A photo of a BTS stadium gig in Taiwan accompanies the latest announcement from Ticketmaster, signifying its ambitions in Asia. The company has acquired Taiwanese ticketing company Tixcraft, while also launching a Ticketmaster Singapore operation. “We have established two great bases with talented teams to support the bourgeoning live entertainment scene in Asia,” said Ticketmaster International […]

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has long been a thorn in the side of secondary ticketing firm Viagogo. Now it’s also training its sights on StubHub, the company that Viagogo is in the process of buying for $4.05bn. The CMA has told StubHub that it may face court action unless it makes some key changes to […]

Dutch secondary-ticketing firm TicketSwap has hired former EMI/Universal Music insight director Chris Carey as its new head of international marketing. The company aims to make secondary ticketing “fairer, safer and more transparent” at a time when the biggest firm in the secondary world, Viagogo, is under sustained attack from the music industry and regulators alike. […]

Christmas is coming, and Music Ally’s list of cheap music-streaming subscription promotions is getting fat. YouTube is the latest in to the festive fray, with a ‘Cyber Week’ offer in the US of an extended three-month free trial of its YouTube Premium tier, rather than the usual one month of free access. That includes YouTube […]

TikTok is testing a new music-related feature in Thailand: selling tickets. The company is partnering with several local companies, including BEC Tero (which promotes concerts, owns a record label and produces films and TV shows); Neon Festivals; ticketing firm Ticketmelon; and cinema chain Major Cineplex. For now, TikTok will be selling tickets for 500 films […]

Tegan and Sara are excellent, so news of them playing to a half-empty venue is disheartening. But doubly so because it wasn’t the result of poor ticket sales: according to Billboard, the sparsely-attended gig on 30 September in San Diego was because touts had snaffled most of the tickets. The duo have fought back, however, by […]

If you ever want to feel sympathy for the challenges that music/tech journalists face, read our 2018 report that included an ‘A to Z of Blockchain Music Startups’ and see our valiant efforts to find different ways of writing ‘X is a blockchain ticketing startup promising to beat touting and enable tickets to be transferred legally’. There […]

Spanish live firm Primavera Sound is going to take its events ticketless, including its flagship festival in Barcelona. The company is doing it via an exclusive multi-year partnership with ticketing startup Dice, which will be powering mobile tickets for the company’s events. Dice reckons this will make Primavera Sound in Barcelona the world’s ‘biggest mobile-only […]

Here’s a new buzzphrase for the live-music industry: ‘post-primary ticketing’. What’s that? According to ticketing firm Lyte, it’s “private label ticketing services offered to fans by the most iconic sports and entertainment brands… a platform that addresses the customer needs ignored by the traditional secondary market, and it does so in a way that is […]

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with ticketing startup Dice – in March, when the company launched in the US. Now it’s expanding again, this time to Italy. Dice’s app is now live there, complete with an exclusive deal to sell tickets for FKA Twigs’ next Milan concert in November. Dice also says […]

British regulator the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been harrying secondary-ticketing firm Viagogo for some time now over how it presents tickets to its customers. In July, the CMA announced plans to move forward with legal proceedings against Viagogo for contempt of court, claiming that it had failed to comply with a court order mandating changes. […]

TickPick started life in 2011 as a secondary ticketing website, but has since expanded into primary ticketing too, working directly with festivals, sporting bodies and other entertainment events in the US. Now the company has raised its first ever round of institutional funding, and it’s a biggish one: $40m from investment firm PWP Growth Equity. […]

Secondary ticketing firm Viagogo has been under fire in the UK for some time from politicians, regulators and anti-touting campaigners alike. The latest development sees the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announcing plans to move forward with legal proceedings for contempt of court against Viagogo, claiming that the company has failed to comply with a court […]

YouTube continues to build up the concert-ticketing features within its service. The latest example is a partnership with ticketing firm AXS, focused on the US. “Fans watching videos from YouTube Official Artist Channels will now see listings from AXS events included on the video page,” explained YouTube. “Taking the jump to the live experience is easier than […]

Ticketmaster has unveiled a new feature for its digital-ticketing technology, called SafeTix. It’s about tying every ticket to the buyer’s smartphone via “an encrypted barcode that automatically refreshes every few seconds”, as well as NFC technology (if supported by their phone) that means they can ‘tap in’ when entering venues. “For fans, SafeTix will provide the […]

There’s a new startup hoping to make an impact on the Japanese concert-ticketing market. Zaiko has just raised its first round of seed funding according to IQ, and is rolling out its white-label service, which will help promoters, venues and artists to sell tickets directly to fans. The funding came from investors including VC firm North Base Media […]

Sorry, make that *three* pieces of new legislation in Europe that have implications for the music industry. Alongside the new copyright directive and new platform-to-business regulations, there’s also a crackdown afoot on ticket-buying bots. Yesterday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted to outlaw the use of bots to get around maximum-limits on buying tickets, […]

Earlier this year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) set a deadline for secondary-ticketing sites to improve the information they provided about tickets listed for resale. Most complied, but Viagogo has been under scrutiny on this point: on 24 January, the CMA raised concerns and told the company to “make any necessary changes without […]

Ticketmaster recently shut down its secondary-ticketing websites GetMeIn and Seatwave in Europe last year, shifting the option for fans to resell tickets to its own platform instead. Now could eBay be getting rid of its secondary-ticketing division StubHub? It’s possible, albeit with a sale an option rather than a shutdown. eBay has announced “a strategic review” […]

British ticketing app Dice has been expanding in Europe for some time, but now it’s targeting the biggest music market of all: the US. The app is now available in the US with a roster of concerts initially in Los Angeles and New York, including exclusive partnerships with a selection of venues. The launch isn’t […]

Last Thursday (17 January) was the deadline set by the UK’s competition watchdog the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) for secondary-ticketing sites to change the way they listed tickets offered for resale. New rules included the requirement to show what seat in a venue a ticket is for, as well as the identity of the seller […]