It looks like behemoth ticket vendor Ticketmaster is going to have to share the spotlight. Former Ticketmaster client Anschutz Entertainment Group has created a ticketing company to compete with the beast.
You may know Ticketmaster from such inauspicious legal as Ticketmaster vs. Pearl Jam, Ticketmaster vs. String Cheese Incident, and Bruce Springsteen vs. Ticketmaster, the first of which famously ended Pearl Jam’s 1994 tour. However, as miffed as Pearl Jam was about their extortion-quality ticket prices, they found it incredibly difficult to do concert-business outside of Ticketmaster and resumed their relationship with the monolith four years later.
AEG first expressed interest in creating a competitor to Ticketmaster early last year after Ticketmaster merged with promoter LiveNation. Antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department have approved the competitor for business. Instead of taking Ticketmaster’s offer to use their ticketing software, AEG is going through another Outbox Technologies Inc., a smaller company which is run by former Ticketmaster exec Fredric Rosen who helped steer the distributor to market dominance in the ’80s and ’90s.
The partnership speaks well of AEG: instead of using a centralized site like Ticketmaster, Outbox uses the local venue’s sites to distribute tickets and is mostly invisible to consumers.
“This isn’t about trying to go out there and build a whole new brand around the name Outbox,” said AEG Chief Executive Tim Leiweke, in an interview. “This is about service.”
Can I get a, “hell yeah”?
(hat tip to Tiny Mix Tapes)
