Pandora is Taking on Ticketing with 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.

Announcing its Ticketfly buy, Pandora said yesterday that bringing the two companies together would “solve the longstanding problem of event discovery by seamlessly connecting Pandora’s almost 80 million monthly active music fans to events they’ll love – this will enable artists and promoters to sell out more shows and will strengthen the bond between artists and their fans”.

Now Pandora says it wants to use its data to help touring artists better find their fans and sell more tickets.

Ticketfly now serves several Memphis venues, including Minglewood Hall in Midtown and the New Daisy on Beale Street.

Founded in 2008, Ticketfly quickly became a pioneer in the sales of online tickets for the live events industry, offering ticket sales, digital marketing and analytics software for about 600 websites and 1,200 venues across the country. That transaction is reportedly valued at $450M.

“Over the past ten years we have amassed the largest, most engaged audience in streaming music history”, he went on. For Pandora, the move into ticketing gives it another revenue stream alongside advertising and subscriptions.

The new deal will be following last year’s introduction of Pandora’s Artist Marketing Platform, which Pandora uses to provide important information to musicians such as what songs are being played and where.

The companies say Ticketfly sold 16 million tickets to 90,000 events a year ago, with the value of those tickets surpassing $500 million. This spring it worked with the Rolling Stones to promote their North American “Zip Code” tour.

“Selling your baby is never easy … but I trust my friends at Pandora and believe that they have Ticketfly’s best interests at heart and won’t do anything to change what makes us so special”, Dreskin said. Egbert said Ticketfly had about $55 million in revenue in 2014 and should have $75 million to $80 million this year. As of now, the deal is said to take place for a whopping sum of $450 million which is subject to certain purchase price adjustments, with a nearly equal balance of cash and stock.