Like going to sporting events, concerts represent a communal effect unlike anything else. These moments fans tend to anticipate and cherish over simply watching or listening to songs at home. Whether it’s an athlete or musician on stage, sometimes fans can’t help the urge to get closer to the performance.
Now, fans attending concerts will have the option to be accommodated in similar fashion as when they go to a game. Experience, an event-focused mobile technology company, recently announced an exclusive partnership with Live Nation and Ticketmaster that will integrate their seating upgrade tech across these music and ticketing giants’ app properties. This deal certainly is a significant one among the array of in-venue seat upgrade apps in the marketplace.
Since Experience looks to help fans have more fun at live events, this shared vision with both Live Nation and Ticketmaster facilitated the mutual interest to augment their business relationship. They already work with more than 20 clients that use Ticketmaster as their ticketing systems. This experience–no pun intended–revealed their technological integration could be advanced further to benefit these clients and fans. The fact that Live Nation has 22,000 promoted concerts across its network of 46 amphitheaters nationwide projects scalability to reach millions.
According to Live Nation Entertainment’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Rapino, their iPhone App alone registered over 3 million downloads between 2011 to 2012 alone. It’s only been a year since they launched an Android version, which strengthens Experience’s position to tap into the music vertical at an incredible reach. Live Nation even ran a sweepstakes to win a year’s worth of tickets for downloading or upgrading to their apps at the time; there’s a natural synergy to enable Experience’s “Memories” product to activate experiential components as well.
From a technological standpoint, Experience utilizes their proprietary algorithms that tailor options for each fan on who they are and why they are attending the event in order for fans to upgrade their seats before or during it. They possess exclusive access to Ticketmaster’s API, which will provide them the ability to improve current products and innovate new ones seamlessly. This facet is instrumental towards ensuring a maximized connection among all these parties at live events.
Thus, as a “preferred partner” of Ticketmaster, Experience has an unprecedented degree of integration into their ticketing systems and fan facing applications.
“We are committed to working with Ticketmaster and Live Nation to further glean from our collective experiences to ensure we are developing cutting edge products that meet and exceeds the needs of today’s fan,” Ben Ackerman, Experience’s President, told SportTechie.
Sports and music are one in the same. The entertainment value will only increase as digital and experiential merge to enhance the live, in-venue experience. And that’s something that Live Nation and Ticketmaster have currently made available on select events and more to come next year through further integrating Experience within their mobile properties.