Disruptive discount provider Groupon and live events company Live Nation have teamed up to launchGrouponLive, a new site for ticketing deals. Live Nation Entertainment, formed by the combination of concert promoter Live Nation and ticket seller Ticketmaster, currently promotes over 20,000 shows per year. But with the economy’s downturn, selling out a show is hard these days. The new venture, GrouponLive, will address that problem, not only by discounting seats, but also through the power of the Groupon brand, which brings the news of concerts and other events to Groupon’s worldwide user base of millions. Many of these users represent new business for Live Nation, as they may not have heard of the events being promoted beforehand or they decide to buy a ticket at the last minute, but only due to a deal.
According to Live Nation President and CEO Michael Rapino, discounting tickets was the easy part. “The hard part is finding a value partner with 70 million eyeballs that wake up every morning with their shopping carts open,” he told USA Today.
With Groupon, he has found that partner. The daily deals site, launched in November 2008 in Chicago, now delivers over 900 deals per day in over 500 markets around the world.
Rapino is hopeful that this partnership will help the struggling concert industry, which has seen attendance drop 9.4% from 2009 to 2010. “You have to look at different ways and price points to sell those final 10 rows,” Rapino explained.
In addition to music concerts, GrouponLive will also sell discounted tickets to sports events, theater, arts and other live events. As with Groupon, the deals will arrive as emails to customers’ inboxes.
You can visit the website GrouponLive right now to sign up for Live Nation’s deals. We just did, but we aren’t sure when the first emailed discount will show up. GrouponLive’s official launch is said to be planned “in time for the summer concert season,” which, unlike the first day of summer, doesn’t have an official start date.
