bowery-ballroom
Bowery Ballroom (via Facebook)

Bowery Ballroom & Mercury Lounge now use Ticketfly (and still will when AEG buys Bowery Presents)

Bowery Ballroom
Bowery Ballroom (via Facebook)

Bowery Presents’ venues switched from Ticketweb to its owner Ticketmaster a long time ago, but two of their venues, Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, will soon switch to Ticketfly, reports Billboard. Ticketfly, which was bought by Pandora last year, is also the ticket seller for SummerStage, Baby’s All Right, The Bell House, Port Chester’s Capitol Theatre, and other venues in the NYC area. Though Bowery Presents is being acquired by AEG (who have their own AXS ticketing system so they don’t need to use the Live Nation owned Ticketmaster), Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge will remain with Ticketfly. If you have questions, Billboard talked with Ticketfly co-founder and CEO Andrew Dreskin about the deal:

With AEG Live on the verge of acquiring Bowery Presents, why wouldn’t those two venues switch to AEG’s ticketing platform?
They’re separate entities from Bowery Presents. But look, what I can say is the owner of the two venues considered proposals from numerous companies and in the end decided that Ticketfly was the best home for those venues. If Bowery Presents is acquired by AEG Live, that will in no way affect us.

How do the Bowery and Mercury Lounge plan to use Pandora to influence how they book and promote shows?
The thing that promoters are focusing in on is, first, Pandora’s scale. Pandora is massive — nearly 80 million people use Pandora every month for on average 23 hours to listen to music. Second, the ability to target listeners with laser precision; Pandora knows what acts you’re interested in, what are affinity or similar acts, and they have great ability to surface ticket sales information to listeners in listener flow in terms of audio messages, audio ads, artist audio messages and other ways as well, and that’s very appealing to venues and promoters in terms of increasing sell-thru rates.

And third, and I know this was of interest to the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, is the data learning that comes out of Pandora and the ability to utilize those within their business. One example is in the talent buying process: Pandora has troves and troves of data around what artists are trending, in what markets are people creating lots of stations for an artist, how many spins an artist is receiving, and we can share that information with our clients when it comes time for them to book talent.