Primary ticket selling giant Ticketmaster will officially be spun off and begin trading its stock publicly on August 21, according to a statement issued today from parent company InterActiveCorp (IAC).
Called the world’s leading ticket company in TicketNews’s exclusive industry rankings, Ticketmaster will trade under the symbol TKTMV on Nasdaq. Other IAC properties being spun off, including TREE.com and HSN, Inc., will also begin being traded publicly on the 21st.
The spin-off comes at a critical time for Ticketmaster as it prepares for life without Live Nation, which is creating a ticket selling operation of its own in 2009. Ticketmaster will sell Live Nation tickets for the House of Blues venues Live Nation owns.
Ticketmaster President and CEO Sean Moriarty is confident that the company is poised to succeed when its Live Nation contract expires in December, in part because it expects to cut $35 million costs out of the business and continue to ramp up its secondary ticket sales under its subsidiary TicketsNow.
In its most recently reported fiscal quarter, IAC said Ticketmaster’s revenues grew about $90 million to $382.4 million compared to the same period in 2007, of which TicketsNow contributed about $45 million.