By Kelly McWilliams
German multimedia force Bauer Media recently relaunched its ticketing site, Aloud.com, and it has invited resale site Seatwave.com to take on the secondary ticketing piece of the venture.
Bauer Media is a division of the Bauer Publishing Group, a German media giant founded in 1875 with bases today in numerous countries. Following the Group’s acquisition in early 2008 of the UK company EMAP’s consumer magazine, radio and TV interests, Bauer became a premier magazine publishing company in England, and Bauer Media was formed from these new UK acquisitions. The Bauer Group had owned the Aloud.com site, where its magazines’ readers go to purchase concert tickets, for some time without actively promoting the site. Seatwave’s founder and CEO Joe Cohen took notice.
“We’re thrilled, absolutely,” Cohen told TicketNews. He will be among the speakers next month at Ticket Summit 2009 Vegas, July 15-17. “We have great hope [that we can work together] to turn this into a successful ticketing destination.”
He added, “Aloud.com’s been around for a long time,…and its potential had not been exploited. [The company was] not really using it very much to drive a lot of traffic to it.”
Cohen noted that the low-profile site had upwards of a quarter million visitors “with no promotion at all. We reached out to Bauer maybe 6 months ago. Originally I went to them because I wanted to see if we could buy [the Aloud.com site] from them.”
That was initially a no go, according to Cohen, though, he added, Bauer seemed glad to offer the opportunity for further talks. Ultimately, Bauer proposed an alliance, with Seatwave providing the secondary ticketing platform for the relaunch of Aloud.com. Cohen was thrilled. He believes that the broad range of music genres covered by Bauer’s magazines will provide a rich base of fans who are directed to Aloud to purchase tickets. “I see the relaunch [as providing] an important commerce destination for the magazines. I was personally excited to see that they were going to do that, and even more so when they said they wanted to work with us to build the ticket exchange for Aloud.com. It’s just come online in the last few weeks, but we’ve probably spent two or three months building it.”
Cohen sees a bright future for Seatwave’s new partnership with Bauer and Aloud.com. “We think it’s a great place for us to be. After Aloud.com has been ignored and neglected for a very long time, it seems as though it has a parentage now that is looking forward to nurturing it. It’s a site that’s been out there for more than ten years, and now [together we can] turn it into something big.”
