Blockbuster to distribute Live Nation tickets
Tickets will be sold at 500 stores starting next year
By Danny King -- Video Business, 12/2/2008
DEC. 2 | Blockbuster will be the exclusive physical distributor of live event tickets for the in-house ticketing company of Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter.
Starting with next year’s concert season, Live Nation will sell tickets at about 500 Blockbuster stores for three years, the companies said in a statement today. Live Nation will give the Blockbuster stores exclusive blocks of tickets for the first four hours of ticket sales. The agreement marks Blockbuster’s first foray into event ticket sales in more than a decade.
“Not only will this agreement drive hundreds of thousands of customers to our stores, it represents another step in the transformation of Blockbuster into a brand that offers the most convenient access to entertainment,” Blockbuster’s CEO Jim Keyes said in the statement.
With the Live Nation agreement in place, Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie-rental chain, continues to try to augment its DVD-rental revenue by expanding other businesses such as digital downloads and videogame sales. Blockbuster said last week that it will start selling a set-top box that will play digital downloads from Blockbuster.com directly on consumers’ TV sets, allowing the largest U.S. movie-rental chain to compete directly with Netflix and Apple in the digital content delivery field.
Live Nation promotes more than 16,000 events and sells more than 45 million tickets a year. Last month, the company said its third-quarter net income tripled as sales rose 9.4% to $1.59 billion.
Blockbuster last month said it narrowed its third-quarter loss by 48% as the company slightly boosted rental revenue and capitalized on the booming videogame market. The company raised rental rates while cutting its store count by about 4% from a year earlier.
The 500 stores with ticket sales will be in larger cities and close to both Live Nation venues and Ticketmaster retail outlets, Blockbuster spokesman Randy Hargrove said today. In the early ’90s, Blockbuster sold concert tickets at its Blockbuster Music Stores chain but has long since exited that business.
