Music Ally

In the last of a five-part series on self-service ticketing we speak to Martin Fitzgerald, head of business development at See Tickets, one of the UK’s leading ticket agents.

Martin’s comments can be found within a feature in last week’s Music Ally PDF Report alongside insights from executives at companies including Eventbrite, Clubtickets and Brown Paper Tickets. If you’re not yet a Music Ally subscriber you can sign up for a two week trialin a matter of minutes to read the original article as well as stories dating back nearly ten years.

Meanwhile, for the Q&A with Martin Fitzgerald from See Tickets, continue reading after the jump…

(more…)

In the second part of a five-part series on self-service ticketing we speak to Steve Machin, whose extensive experience at companies from Ticketmaster to Tixdaq to Live Nation’s Ultrastar makes him a leading expert in the world of entertainment ticketing.

Steve’s comments can also be found within a feature in last week’s Music Ally PDF Report alongside insights from executives at companies including See Tickets, Clubtickets and Eventbrite. If you’re not yet a Music Ally subscriber you can sign up for a two week trial in a matter of minutes to read the original article as well as stories dating back nearly ten years.

Meanwhile, for the Q&A with Steve Machin, CEO of Stormcrowd, continue reading after the jump.

(more…)

AEG Live issued a statement over the weekend clarifying its plans to refund people who’ve bought tickets for the planned run of 50 Michael Jackson gigs at The O2 in London. Well, we say clarified, it’s more telling people when they plan to clarify their plans.

“On behalf of the entire AEG organisation we extend our deepest condolences to Michael Jackson’s family and friends during this tragic time. Full ticket refund information and procedures will be released early next week for all Michael Jackson “This Is It” shows. Fans are advised to hold onto their ticket vouchers/proof of purchase.”

Ticketmaster, which emailed the statement to everyone who’d bought tickets from it, added that it will contact all these customers once AEG’s refund plans have been finalised.

This doesn’t, of course, apply to people who bought tickets on eBay or from ticket reselling sites. For more on the potential fallout in the secondary ticketing market from Jackson’s death, read our post from Friday.

Sounds like an outlandish headline, sure, but we were chatting to a promoter the other day, and they made a throwaway remark that Michael Jackson probably made more money in three days last week from ticket sales for his gigs at The O2 than he did from his Thriller album.

Their working went thus: Thriller sold 45 million albums worldwide, and according to the promoter, Jacko would have got on average no more than £1 per album – so £45 million in total. But 50 nights times 20,000 people times £75 equals £75 million, which even at a conservative estimate of an 80:20 split with promoter AEG is £60 million for the King of Pop.

One of the flaws in this logic is the fact that only the top-priced tickets were £75 for The O2 gigs, although that may be balanced by the fact that Jackson may be on an 85:15 or even 90:10 split, trousering him even more loot. Of course, the star made a lot more money from Thriller indirectly too – think of the tours, the sponsorships…

Still, as headline figures go, it’s not bad for 50 nights work…

So much for O2’s exclusive pre-sale on Michael Jackson tickets this morning, then. At the time of writing, the company’s priority tickets site has crashed under the weight of demand, alternately throwing up ‘Server is too busy’ and page not found messages when we try to access it.

O2 customers who registered yesterday to get a special code are already commenting on our previous story – while predictable, the server snafu is a bit of an own-goal for O2, as it risks angering customers who were looking forward to securing their tickets.

“Well my O2 priority password is not valid and neither are 2 friends of mine who have a password!!! To say we’re annoyed is an understatement!! Would love to know who else on O2 has not been able to get their ‘unique password’ for this event to work!!” is one comment.

“ive received a code from the 02, but went online at 7am the website says server busy and link broken and phone lines 2402 free on 02 mobile say network busy it wont connect” is another.

Ouch. We’ll keep hitting refresh, obviously, and let you know how it goes.

O2 has revealed that its customers will get priority tickets for the upcoming Michael Jackson gigs in London, but only if they text JACKSON to the shortcode 2402.

In return, they’ll be sent a code tomorrow morning, which can be used online to buy priority tickets. Whether this means they get in ahead of the hundreds of thousands of fans who’ve registered at the official Michael Jackson Live website remains to be seen.

O2 announced the news on its Twitter feed. It’s no surprise to find the operator leveraging its sponsorship of The O2 venue – where Jackson’s gigs are due to take place. It’ll be interesting to see if the operator also gets some exclusive content for its customers around the gigs.

The tickets will be sold from this website from 7am tomorrow morning (Wednesday 11th March).

Another big trend at CTIA this year is Research In Motion’s determination to pitch its BlackBerry handsets as multimedia-friendly, rather than boring business email devices. One example is a deal with Ticketmaster, which will involve the development of a BlackBerry application enabling users to (more…)