Secondary’s The Ticket For LN

Live Nation signaled it’s casting its corporate gaze into the secondary ticket market in a presentation CEO Michael Rapino made at Goldman Sachs 2007 Communocopia Conference in New York City September 19th.

Just shy of a month after Ticketmaster announced it was ending negotiations for another deal when its contract with Live Nation runs out next year, Rapino told the Goldman Sachs audience, "We’d love to be in that market, instead of ceding it to eBay, StubHub and scalpers.

"We have zero market share in [the secondary market]. We should be in that business and the artists want us to be in that business."

As for ending its relationship with Ticketmaster, Rapino said his company had internally debated its future relationship all year.

"Ticketmaster is great but last year we produced more than 10,000 shows and dealt with 40 million consumers, and we don’t even know their names," Rapino said, hitting on a consistent theme for the Live Nation chief.

Rapino has often spoken of capturing such data as e-mail addresses, demographic information and other market research to directly market to and maintain relationships with the individual concertgoer according to specific preferences, a la Amazon.com and NetFlix.

In addition to acquiring fan data now lost to Ticketmaster, Rapino said Live Nation will gain additional control over the distribution of tickets and confirmed it was looking to form its own ticketing business.

The current Ticketmaster deal with Live Nation ends next year with the exception of its House of Blues division, which carried over its TM agreement through 2009 made before its acquisition by LN.