X

Groupon, Live Nation team up for online ticketing

New service will be called GrouponLive and will be ready "in time for the summer concert season," the companies say.

Don Reisinger
CNET contributor Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don's work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications.
See full bio
Don Reisinger
2 min read

Groupon has partnered with Live Nation to bring concertgoers deals on local events.

Dubbed GrouponLive, the service will combine Groupon's local-distribution abilities with Live Nation's roster of events. Consumers will be able to use GrouponLive to find limited-time deals on sporting events, concerts, theater shows, and other live events, the companies said. However, it will be limited to North America.

The pairing of Groupon, a deal-a-day provider, and Live Nation is an interesting one. Live Nation currently operates the world's most popular ticketing service, Ticketmaster. It also runs Live Nation Concerts, which puts on over 20,000 shows from 2,000 artists around the world.

Screenshot by Ron Reisinger/CNET

Last week, Live Nation reported its first-quarter earnings. The company's attendance was static year over year, but its ticket volume was up 11 percent. Though the company posted a net loss of $54 million on the quarter, its revenue was up substantially from the $723 million it made in the first quarter of 2010 to $849 million this year.

With the help of Groupon, Live Nation believes it can aid "artists and others to reach ever larger audiences."

"By adding this channel to our ticketing platform, we will also provide our venue partners with another option for driving ticket sales across a wide range of events," Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said in a statement. "Our success is based on selling tickets and filling seats and GrouponLive gives us another platform to achieve this."

The announcement of GrouponLive comes at a time when Groupon is facing more pressure than ever. Aside from competing services from Google, Facebook, and Amazon-backed LivingSocial, AT&T announced last week that it's launching a Groupon rival through its Yellow Pages site.

Those firms have good reason to be jumping into the deal-a-day market. According to a report released earlier this year by local-media adviser Bia/Kelsey, deal-a-day U.S. revenue is expected to hit $4 billion in 2015. Last year, the market's revenue was $873 million.

GrouponLive will launch at some point before the "summer concert season," the companies said. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.