YouTube today announced a partnership with Ticketmaster that will see the Google-owned video network connecting fans with concert tickets and tour information directly on artists’ YouTube video pages. Starting today, YouTube will begin featuring hundreds of artists’ upcoming U.S. tour dates on their YouTube videos beneath the video’s description.
This added integration will include information about the nearest show as well as upcoming tour dates. Only the first few dates will show by default, but users can click to expand this list if they want to see dates further out.
Next to all the listings is a “tickets” button that, when clicked, will redirect users to Ticketmaster’s website to make their purchase. The experience works on both web and mobile, though it looks slightly different, depending on the platform.
YouTube says it had been experimenting with a way to offer a ticketing experience on its site before landing on this Ticketmaster integration.
For now, it’s live only with artists who have Ticketmaster shows in North America, but the plan is to expand this both in the U.S. and globally going forward. The company also hints this is the first of other planned features focused on artist-to-fan connections, but it didn’t detail those plans.
The move comes at a time when Spotify is running away with the streaming market, and specifically has been working to improve its platform for artists with things like a data dashboard and native app for updating artists’ profiles, playlists, and checking their stats. Apple Music, meanwhile, tried and failed in artist-to-fan connections with Connect, a social feed for artist updates.
However, Ticketmaster’s deal is not exclusive to YouTube – the company last year integrated with Spotify for ticket sales as well, and Ticketmaster sells through Facebook.
The move to also go live on YouTube makes sense, given that one of its bigger use cases is music discovery and streaming – so much so that it has its own dedicated mobile app, and offline video streaming is packaged as a part of a YouTube Red subscription. YouTube also has a massive audience to market these tickets – with 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users, this exposes Ticketmaster concerts to a huge number of online music fans.
Presumably, there’s some sort of revenue sharing agreement here for the ticket sales that are initiated via YouTube, but the company didn’t say. We reached out to YouTube for more information about the business arrangement between the companies, and were told: “we don’t disclose the terms of our deals.”
The new experience is available on an artist’s official music video on YouTube, meaning VEVO pages and artist channels. The event listings appear on YouTube desktop, and web and mobile app experiences on video watch pages.
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