Ticketfly takes flight as pesky online ticketing competitor to Live Nation

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Ticketfly alight as pesky ticketing competitor

LOS ANGELES — If Live Nation Entertainment Inc. is now the elephant of ticket-selling after merging with Ticketmaster, Ticketfly is one of its pesky new competitors.

The startup is run by one of the co-founders of TicketWeb, an online seller of independent music concert tickets that was sold to Ticketmaster in 2000.

Ticketfly boasts that its add-on fees are on average 40 percent lower than those charged by Ticketmaster, and that it has no charge for printing tickets at home. It also offers an easy way for venue owners and promoters to tout shows on Facebook and Twitter and via e-mail.

On Wednesday, it planned to announce $3 million in funding, including from venture capitalists such as High Peaks Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners.

The fly analogy is apt.

The company says it is on target to sell 1 million tickets in its first 12 months of operation since last June. The newly merged Live Nation sold 140 million tickets last year.

Ticketfly’s 50 clients are a mix of venue owners and concert promoters. A little more than half are former clients of Ticketmaster or TicketWeb. Clients are as large as the 19,000-capacity Merriweather Post Pavilion amphitheater in Columbia, Md., and as small as the 600-capacity Troubadour nightclub in Los Angeles.

Andrew Dreskin, the co-founder and co-chief executive, said one of his company’s advantages is that it just handles ticketing and isn’t in the business of booking acts into venues the way Live Nation is.

As a condition of Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster, the Justice Department mandated that Live Nation could not access Ticketmaster sales data to better compete for concert promotion work. Dreskin said some concert promoters doubt that condition can be policed. In contrast, Dreskin said, “we don’t compete with our clients.”

On the Net:

Ticketfly: bit.ly/arimco