Pandora Adds Concert Ticket Notifications as First Step of Ticketfly Integration
Pandora took a first major step towards integrating its concert ticketing unit Ticketfly with its music streaming service: Pandora listeners are now being shown recommendations for concerts in their area that are based on the music they listen to.
Pandora listeners will get to see these recommendations within the app’s feed, through push notifications on their mobile device and as part of a weekly email. Users who click on any of these notifications are being forwarded to Ticketfly’s app or website.
Notifications to fans of a band are triggered as soon as a concert promoter creates an event on Ticketfly, explained Ticketfly founder Andrew Dreskin during an interview with Variety this week. “We believe this is incredibly powerful,” he said.
Pandora is using the behavior of listeners on its platform to find the best target audience for each concert. Users may get a recommendation for a concert if they have been listening to a playlist of a certain band, or if they have thumbed-up the band’s music.
Pandora has long used this kind of data to generate music recommendations for its radio service, but COO Sara Clemens argued that this is the first time that this kind of granular targeting is being used for concert ticket promotions. Add the size of Pandora’s audience, and you can start to sell out shows that would otherwise not have gotten the same attention. “We have an audience of 80 million listeners,” she said.
Pandora acquired Ticketfly for $450 million in October of 2015. The company wants to eventually make ticketing one of a number of music-related businesses, which will also include paid on-demand streaming. Pandora aims to launch an on-demand service to better compete with Spotify and Apple Music before the end of the year.
But getting to this fully integrated music service with multiple revenue streams is taking some time for Pandora. The company’s CEO Tim Westergren acknowledged during its most recent earnings call that Pandora has yet to strike deals with the three major music labels for its streaming service.
Likewise, its integration of Ticketfly is a longer process that won’t end with Wednesday’s new alert features. Eventually, Pandora aims to integrate ticket sales directly into its own app, and do away with the need to create a separate Ticketfly account. “This is just the first step,” said Dreskin.
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