By Stacey Willets
TicketNews.com
This week’s exclusive Top Ten Primary and Secondary Live Event Ticket Sellers Rankings are something to blog about. In case you missed it, here is a quick taste of where all the websites stand.
For this week’s second-ranked primary seller Live Nation, business is good. Unlike IAC, parent company of industry leader Ticketmaster, Live Nation’s second quarter financials failed to disappoint. The company is the producer for Stevie Wonder’s tour as well as Jennifer Lopez & Marc Anthony’s, both of which are big movers on the TicketNews Top Tens concerts chart this week. The concert promoter is also producing the much anticipated Van Halen tour, and fans can now download software that will enable them to conveniently search LiveNation.com for tickets to the event on their own web sites. . .
With the option to add the newly released Live Nation search tool to web sites, blogs, and social networking pages, the additional exposure the company could potentially see is dizzying. MySpace alone boasted over one hundred million accounts last year, and people love their widgets. If Live Nation could make their widget play the music of the artist being searched or tell users their astrological compatibility with their rockstar crushes, it would be on every MySpace and Facebook page in no time.
With Live Nation’s rebound, Tickets.com drops back to number three. TicketWeb remains at four. Etix.com and Tix each move up one spot, appearing and five and six, respectively. Wantickets dips back into the bottom half of the rankings, taking number seven this week. Rankings number eight and nine are filled by Telecharge and TicketsWest, each gaining one position. ComcastTix joins the chart at number ten.
There is a bit of shifting around in the Secondary Ticket Sellers rankings. The top four remain unchanged, with StubHub! leading, followed by TicketsNow, TicketLiquidator, and TickCo Premium Seating. GoTickets.com moves up to number five this week, pushing ABC Tickets and RazorGator down to six and seven. Online Seats is this week’s big mover, jumping from thirteen to eight. Tickets Plus and Ticket City are also up, both advancing one place to nine and ten. NetTickets.com, which debuted last week, drops out of the Top Ten but remains within the Top Twenty Secondary Sellers.
The major players and smaller resellers alike have enjoyed a string of victories for the secondary market. Not only has one state after another recently repealed anti-scalping laws, fans are getting better pricing in the free market, which helps to eradicate the “Big Bad Broker” stigma that secondary ticketers have been branded with in the past. At the 2007 Ticket Summit trade show, keynote speaker former Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen told the assembly that brokers are not part of the problem, they are part of the solution. StubHub’s partnership with Major League Baseball reinforces that idea and further aids resellers on the path towards legitimacy. It’s just a question of when they’ll officially get there. Even Pinocchio eventually became a real boy.
Despite the building strength of the secondary market, primary sellers gain some ground on the Top Overall Sellers chart. They increase their presence by one, occupying four spots in the rankings with Ticketmaster at one, Live Nation at four, Tickets.com at five, and TicketWeb moving up to ten. The secondary players that remain include StubHub! at two, TicketsNow at three, TicketLiquidator at six, TickCo Premium Seating at seven, GoTickets.com at eight, and ABC Tickets at nine.
To see all the Top Tens rankings, check out the press release in the Daily Buzz section of TicketNews.com. Visit the Industry resources section of TicketNews.com for full lists of the Top Twenty Secondary Ticket Sellers and the Top Twenty Overall Ticket Sellers, or to read an explanation of how we calculate the rankings.
