Skip to main content

Ticketfly builds concert app from the ashes of its WillCall acquisition


WillCall had great design and community, but didn’t have tickets to the best concerts.Ticketfly had deep relationships with music venues, but no one was using it to discover shows. Today, Ticketfly’s acquisition of WillCall comes full circle.
The parent company is using what it learned about style and recommendations to launch its own native iOS concert discovery app. Meanwhile, Ticketfly will sunset WillCall, which let users browse and buy tickets to a curated set of shows in SF, NYC, or LA.
07-Combination
The question is whether people will find Ticketfly’s app valuable given that it’s an incomplete list of nearby concerts. Unlike ticketing service-agnostic discovery apps like Songkick or BandsInTown, Ticketfly only highlights shows it sells tickets for directly. If a concert is sold through TicketMaster, EventBrite, or another service, it won’t show up in Ticketfly’s app.
WillCall co-founder turned Ticketfly general manager Donnie Dinch says in the future the app could show inventory from other ticketers. But for now he admits the deficiency, saying “people will primarily use this as a way to access their tickets for shows they’ve purchased through Ticketfly.”
one-tap-purchase
But Ticketfly did build in one of WillCall’s best features: curation. Oftentimes you won’t know the music of every artists playing in your city each night. Thankfully, Ticketfly’s community team will hand-pick featured shows you won’t want to miss. Ticketfly’s app also lets you search through its 90,000 shows per year, and store billing information for rapid two-tap payment. Users can pull up the digital copies of their tickets on the app when they get to the venue door.
0d956d0
WillCall co-founder and Ticketfly GM Donnie Dinch
Ticketfly is also co-opting one of the most beloved features of its comprehensive concert discovery competitors. You’ll be able to set up notifications for your favorite artists to find out when their tickets go on sale so you can score some even if they sell out in seconds.
But perhaps the biggest opportunity here is how Ticketfly’s new native app could interact with Pandora, which acquired the ticketing service for $450 million late last year. See, Pandora has a money problem. After paying out streaming music royalties, it doesn’t get to keep much to cover its costs. Meanwhile, its audio ads are only effective if they’re selling something music lovers want.
Screen Shot 2016-03-16 at 8.02.44 AM
That’s why it acquired Ticketfly. If Pandora could promote Ticketfly concerts via audo ads played to users listening to those artists, it could earn a lot more revenue. And now with a native app, switching users from Pandora to Ticketfly will be much simpler than delivering them to a mobile website.
Between Ticketfly, WillCall, the corpse of Rdio it acquired, Next Big Sound analytics, and its own radio app, Pandora has plenty of music assets. The challenge will be making them all play in harmony.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware (literally and metaphorically). Serverless software deployment to the cloud, this is not. New York City officially got wireless service in every underground subway station a little more than a year ago, and I was curious what work went into the buildout of this system as well as how it will expand in the future. That curiosity is part of a series of articles I’ve written on an observed pattern known as cost disease, the massively inflating costs of basic human services like health care, housing, infrastructure, and education. The United States spends trillions of dollars on each of these fields, massively outspending sim...

South Korea aims for startup gold

Back in 2011, when South Korea won its longshot bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country wasn’t widely recognized as a destination for ski and snow lovers. It wasn’t considered much of a tech startup hub either. Fast forward seven years and a lot has changed. For the next 10 days, the eyes of the world will be on the snowy slopes of PyeongChang. Meanwhile, a couple of hours away in Seoul, a burgeoning startup scene is seeing investments multiply, generating exits and even creating a unicorn or two. While South Korea doesn’t get a perfect score as a startup innovation hub, it has established itself as a serious contender. More than half a billion dollars annually has gone to seed through late-stage funding rounds for the past few years. During that time, at least two companies, e-commerce company Coupang and mobile-focused content and commerce company Yello Mobile, have established multi-billion-dollar valuations. To provide a broader picture of how South Korea stacks ...

Trump cites Facebook exec’s comments downplaying Russian ad influence on election

You’d be forgiven for missing Donald Trump’s multiple retweets of Facebook executive Rob Goldman over the weekend. Perhaps you were spending time with family, watching Black Panther or just attempting to forget politics for a moment by ignoring the manic flurry of social media updates from the leader of the free world. But in amongst a deluge of tweets that blamed Democrats for failing to preserve DACA, called out the FBI over the recent school shooting in Florida on the FBI and affectionately referred to a member of congress as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff, the leakin’ monster of no control,” the President cited Facebook’s VP of Ads as evidence against claims that his campaign colluded with Russia. “The Fake News Media never fails,” Trump tweeted over the weekend. “Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!” Trump was citing Goldman’s own Twitter dump over the past week, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 13 Russian...

3D printing company New Matter is shutting down this month

Perhaps 2014 wasn’t the ideal time to get into the 3D printing game. After years of hype, the even the biggest names have been struggling to stay afloat. Pasadena startup New Matter is joining the growing list of companies who’ve unsuccessfully made a go at it, announcing that it will be closing up shop by the end of the month. It’s not for lacking of trying — and the company’s MOD-t printer was met with decent reviews when it launched in 2016. In his writeup, John praised the pricing ($300 or $400, depending on where you picked one up) and ease of use, though added cautiously, “you get what you pay for.” Initially funded on Indiegogo, the company went back to the crowdfunding well last year, this time taking to Kickstarter to pay for a Model 2. The project managed to exceed its goal in five days, but New Matter still pulled the plug. The company says it ultimately wanted to go back to the drawing board. “We have always strived to listen closely to our customers’ feedback, and...