Facebook to sell concert tickets for Ticketmaster, Eventbrite

Global concert-goers will be able to buy their tickets directly from Facebook by the end of April, after the social media giant entered into partnerships with ticketing agencies Ticketmaster and Eventbrite.

The partnership will only cover a select amount of music events in the beginning, to test consumer response before rolling out to a wider net. Ticketmaster says Facebook will get an “affiliate fee”. Eventbrite is not paying a fee during the trial.

When browsing an official event page on the Facebook iOS and Android app, users can place their Ticketmaster or Eventbrite order by clicking on the new “Buy Tickets” link. The partnership will extend to Facebook’s Messenger service, which will send images of their tickets via Facebook’s experimental virtual assistant M. Even though ticket sales are processed by Facebook, customers have to claim their purchase on the ticket agencies’ websites.

“By putting the ability to buy tickets directly within Facebook we hope that we’re going to provide a more seamless purchase experience and sell more tickets,” Ticketmaster’s VP of Distributed Commerce Dan Armstrong told BuzzFeed, which first broke the story.

Eventbrite VP of Product Laurent Sellier added in a statement, “Because events are inherently social, Facebook has been an important partner to Eventbrite since the early days. We’re excited to continue to work together in new ways to reduce friction for consumers and increase conversion for our organizers.”

The move by the two ticketing agencies is inevitable, given that more people are buying their concert tickets via their mobiles (60% of its sales, according to Ticketmaster).

As of the fourth quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.59 billion monthly active users. Of these, 1.44 billion are active mobile users (up 21.3% from the year before), according to eMarketer report Global Social Platforms 2016: A Country-by-Country Review of Social Network Usage released last week. Over the same period, Facebook users who only access the network on their mobiles rose by 13.2% to 823 million.

So it would make perfect sense for the likes of Ticketmaster and Eventbrite to become integrated with services where mobile users already spend a lot of time. Crucial to the new partnership is that they can buy tickets without having to leave the app. At the same time, Ticketmaster continues to develop its own mobile app.

The global concert industry is worth US$10 billion (A$104.5 million), according to Pollstar magazine, and 140 million tickets are shifted each year. Physical tickets are still the norm, even if they are bought online.

But ticketing is become more high-tech, widening to mobile and watch apps. Last month StarHub said its users can use VR to get a preview of where their seats are in the venue before they buy. Spotify and Pandora have begun notifying users of concert events of bands that they most access through the services.

In the UK, where nearly 27 million music event tickets are sold each year generating £1.3 billion ($2.4 billion) according to UK Music and Oxford Economics, two start-ups have taken steps to target early adopters.

Dice developed a free app which includes a curated list of upcoming concerts, and allows purchasers to store their ticket in a virtual wallet on their phone with a QR (Quick Response) code that can be scanned quickly.

Una Tickets provides, for a nominal fee, a plastic membership card with embedded chips. These are scanned at the venue and can also be used for cashless payments. Una also allows members to sell their tickets to other members on the condition it is at their face value.

All these make attending a show as hassle-free as possible. But increasingly, gone are the days when you could keep ticket stubs in the drawer to remind you of the great shows you’ve been at.