LiveNation.com Relaunches As More Than Just A Place To Buy Concert Tickets
(UPDATED) Concert and ticketing giant Live Nation has relaunched its LiveNation.com site as a hub for love music fans. While still the place find out about concerts and buy tickets, the site now also adds exclusive and user generated content in hopes that users will visit before and after the show.
A new feature called "Showbook" cleverly collects concert photos that fans post on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter sorting them by date and show. A Showbook page for a Martina McBride show in Roanoke, VA (click here), for example, includes a countdown clock to showtime, fan photos of previous shows, concert information and social sharing links.
While beautifully designed and cleverly executed, it's unproven that fans of a particular artist or genre will frequent a more general live music site. Those that do, may be disappointed that concert listings are limited to shows affiliated with Live Nation or Ticketmaster, leaving it's utility as concert tracker vs. Songkick, Pollstar or BandsInTown somewhat limited.
Still, a company of Live Nation's size and reach would be foolish not to try to aggregate fan activity; and today's launch is just the first glimpse of the work that Live Nation bought BigChampagne to do. My guess is that Eric Garland and Live Nation Labs team have more they'll be demoing for tech savvy Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino soon.
Bruce, I’m skeptical about the prospects of this redesign attracting more fans to the site. I find it hard to believe, a corporate giant the size of TicketMaster / LiveNation holds a place in fans’ hearts to convince them to share their social activities on their site.
If you poll people on the streets you will find out that most people hate the company due to its monopoly status and fees, etc. And social behavior is driven by loyalty and love towards a service. People share on Instagram, Path, Foursquare because they love the service. Who would say they love “Livenation”? Reason is clear, when you’re a public company your top priority is servicing your stockholders and not your customers. That priority changes everything.
Having said that, the concept of Live Nation Labs is solid. It fits perfectly with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s concepts in his book Innovator’s Dilemma. Basically if you’re a large corporation, you will be disrupted by smaller players because you move slow, you have a lot of red tape in your organization and your managers aren’t motivated to take risks. The way to overcome this, is to spin off a division, set it up like a startup and innovate through it. That’s what Live Nation Labs looks to me like. And the guy heading it up, Ethan Kaplan, seems like he really understands the startup culture and that’s very important to their success. I’m just curious if they are finding the freedoms they need under that umbrella.
It should be interesting to watch if Live Nation Labs starts cranking out innovative solutions around live music despite its parent. I’m curious to see how it plays out…
I think a lot of folks don’t necessarily understand the dynamic that is, Live Nation, or who is putting on a concert when they are at a show.
There are so many affiliations for each event, I think the average consumer gets lost in that, and only cares for seeing their favorite brand- I mean band.
In fact, I think when most people are caught up in a live show, they are so caught up in the experience, they could care less who is bringing them the show.
Therefore, I think the social sharing will happen through this program.
It will just be more like a Google + and done by hipsters who want somewhere not-so-mainstream to share their concert experience.
It’s always fun watching what LN does.
It’ll be even more fun to watch what LN Labs does moving forward.
I think the whole thing would be a lot stronger with partners and incentives to give those who do share some prizes/contests.