Pandora Buys Ticketmaster Competitor Ticketfly

The company’s streaming music service, Pandora Internet Radio – which is only available in the United States, New Zealand and Australia – offers music streaming as well as automated music recommendation; the latter of which being powered by the Music Genome Project. He also said that the company after acquisition will be able to excite music lovers and ramp ticket sales significantly as it will become the best marketplace to connect music makers and fans. That screams ticketing integration and diversification, with Ticketfly overseeing 1,200 different venue relationships and sales of more than 16 million tickets across 90,000 events in 2014 alone. Statistics show that 40 percent of live event tickets go unsold primarily due to lack of awareness. Up until now Pandora’s only revenue source was through it’s popular streaming service. The transaction is valued at approximately $450 million, purchased with a almost equal balance of cash and stock.

“This is a game-changer for Pandora-and more importantly-a game-changer for music”, Brian McAndrews, Pandora CEO, said in a press release statement. Spotify reported in June that it has 75 million active listeners, not far from Pandora’s 80 million. They added that 14 million people visit Ticketfly’s sites each month.

Ticketfly will help the Internet radio company to step into live events, which is a bright area in the music market.

“It’s the ideal solution for listeners, artists, promoters and club owners, bringing the power of scale and personalization to bear on the working musician’s most intractable problem”, wrote Pandora’s founder and chief strategy officer Tim Westergren.

And earlier this year, Pandora rolled out Artist Audio Messages, giving artists the opportunity to promote directly to fans through recorded messages. This could prove to be a good thing for concert-goers of all sorts, not just Pandora users, as ticket sales have always been dominated by Ticketmaster. The service primarily focuses on live music although briefly dabbled in sporting events as well.

As the world moves closer to single companies running (and ruining) entire industries, Pandora has made it clear they see the long-rumored “Spotify Concerts” system as the future of the music business.

We are incredibly excited about all the ways that this will help make live event experiences even better for you.

Ticketfly is an American technology startup that reimages the live event experience for the promoters and fans.