Ticketmaster is making it easier for fans to purchase tickets to their favorite music festivals with the recent procurement of leading festival ticketer Front Gate Tickets and DIY ticketing platform Universe. Live Nation Entertainment President and CEO Michael Rapino recently announced the acquisitions, which will expand the company’s ticketing options within the booming festival and DIY ticketing markets, and will pair clients with the largest and most flexible distribution network through which to engage fans and sell tickets.
Originally launched as an alternative ticketing service for venues across Austin, Texas, Front Gate Tickets has grown into one of the leading festival ticketing platform, serving clients such as Coachella, Austin City Limits, The Governors Ball Music Festival, Lollapalooza and X Games. As Rapino explains, their talent of building a connection between brands and highly engaged festival go’ers will greatly enhance Live Nation’s integrated live-music sponsorships network initiatives.
In addition to ticketing and marketing assets, Front Gate Tickets will allow Ticketmaster access to an array of festival-centric features, such as RFID-powered access control, experimental marketing and cashless POS systems that streamline festival entry, as well as sponsorship activity and concession sales. In 2014 alone, the ticketing guru processed over $300 million in sales, sold 3 million+ tickets, shipped over 1 million wristbands and scanned over 2.5 million RFID chips.
A DIY ticketing company that provides event organizers with various management tools, Universe will bring many advancements to the Ticketmaster world. One such feature is their customizable “Buy Now” option that allows event organizers to embed a customizable button to sell tickets on any website without having to be redirected back to Universe.com.
Per Rapino, Ticketmaster plans to keep the Universe co-founders on board as part of the executive leadership team. “Universe’s advanced DIY ticketing and event marketing platform will not only provide event organizers with amazing tools to manage their events, but their plug-and-play distributed commerce and analytics products will also benefit clients across the entire Ticketmaster portfolio, including festivals,” he explained.
For more information on the recent acquisition, see the official press release.