Jared Smith Plans Exit From Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster Global Chairman Jared Smith is planning to exit the company at the end of the year, Pollstar has confirmed. He will be succeeded by Mark Yovich, currently serving as global president, and Amy Howe will be elevated to the position of COO.

Serving as the head of Ticketmaster since 2018, Smith has been with the company since 2003. He was recently promoted to the new position of global chairman from president, and Howe and Yovich were also recently upped.

Smith was honored in this year’s Impact 50 list, and said he was proud of the way Ticketmaster responded to the COVID-crisis processing changes to 30,000 impacted events within the span of a month – more than the company had to process in the last 15 years. 

Ticketmaster had a record-breaking 2019, only to follow it up with what Smith referred to as the most difficult decision he had to make when the company was forced to lay off approximately 25% of its workforce in April. 

Smith told Sportico, which first broke the news of Smith’s departure, that “the company deserves to have the person who’s going to be here long-term making the hard decisions right now of what it should look like.” According to Sportico, the company’s succession plan will continue efforts to bring together Ticketmaster’s North American and international efforts.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been severely hit by the shutdown of the entertainment industry that began in March, with parent company Live Nation continuously announcing cost-reduction measures that have included furloughs and salary reductions.

By mid-May Michael Rapino had announced he was foregoing his own salary and other execs were taking pay cuts of up to 50%. In its Q2 earnings report for 2020 the company’s posted revenue was $74.1 million, down from Q2 2019’s revenue of 3.15 billion, or 98% from a year ago. Despite the down numbers, Live Nation boasted of 86% of fans opting to keep tickets for rescheduled shows and 19 million tickets sold for events in 2021 as strengths. The company also drew attention to its $800 million cost reduction program target and a $1.4 billion cash management program target for 2020.