Get Your Streaming Money Now!

What’s in it for each side? Ticketfly gets streaming data that it can turn over to promoters. Pandora gets an ecommerce solution that can help artists generate real money. Forget about paying fractions of pennies for song streams – Pandora now has the ability to help artists grow their touring revenue and sell more product directly to fans.

More importantly, it has the potential to give artists a single view of their total income – total streams, number of fans, biggest markets and affinity to other artists. Place transactional data on top and you start to get close to the holy grail of big data – a fully correlated view of the customer. Songkick co-founder Iain Hogarth refers to it as Full Stack Music – the idea that the convergence of radio, streaming and ticketing means we can track the entire fan lifespan and better tailor artist offerings to it.

In the short term, this gives Pandora a slight edge over competitor services like Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL. Besides competing for consumer’s money, they’re also competing for artist catalogs. An ecommerce integration like the one between Pandora and Ticketfly might give the company the edge to win some superstar artists to their platform.

Remember that April Fool’s joke I did early this year when Amplify announced that Tim Leiweke and TIDAL were teaming up to buy Paciolan? It was a believable hoax then that seems even more logical now. Pandora’s purchase will undoubtedly kick off a buying spree driven among the streaming services who feel they need to get into the ticketing game.

We know who is buying: Rdio, Spotify, and maybe Apple Music. But who’s for sale? Or more appropriately, who isn’t? There are billions of dollars up for grabs, and many ticketing executives are realizing there might not be another time like this in the next 10 to 15 years to cash in. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the bigger ticketing companies in the industry get spun off or sold entirely. If I was a ticketing company CEO right now I would probably be thinking about how I could get a share of the TIDAL-wave of streaming money about to be spent.