Ticketmaster And YouTube Partner on Concert Tickets

A screenshot from YouTube.com – Foo Fighters YouTube

YouTube viewers are now being presented with links to tickets for their favorite artists on the same page as official music videos thanks to a partnership between Ticketmaster and the video-sharing giant.

Unveiled Nov. 14, the collaboration gives YouTube viewers dates for upcoming shows and links to Ticketmaster to get them one step closer to purchase.

The collaboration was apparent on videos for artists like Foo Fighters and Halsey, who have tickets on sale through Ticketmaster.

TM reps said listings will be available for 1,000 artists in North America by the end of the year, and will go worldwide in 2018.

This is by no means a first attempt at trying to increase sales by integrating concert listings and ticketing into a streaming platform. Pandora telegraphed this plan in 2015 with its acquisition of Ticketfly. The internet radio company ended up selling the ticketing company to Eventbrite earlier this year.

This past August news broke that Amazon is looking to break into the ticket business and reportedly was in talks with Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster touts the YouTube integration as one of many it has developed over the last several years, which it says has resulted in 10 million more tickets moving through its platform.

YouTube is far in a way the world’s largest streaming service with over a billion users with local versions of the platform available in 88 countries.

Despite the video platform’s massive popularity, many in the music business complain about YouTube’s “value gap,” i.e. the relatively small amount of ad-based revenue the service generates as compared to higher yielding subscription-based services.