Ticketfly raises $50 milllion, and Amazon eyes up tickets

Software company Ticketfly has closed a new financing round, raising $50 million. The round was led by Riverwood Capital, Ticketfly plans to use the funds to accelerate development of its cloud-based live events platform, including new products and services for its existing client base. The financing will also fuel the company's move upstream into larger facilities, its expansion globally and into adjacent verticals, and a reimagined event-going experience for fans. The company's total funding to date is now $85m.

And it seems Amazon is moving into concert and festival ticketing, having started selling tickets to London West End theatre shows earlier this year via its Amazon Local platform. Among the music events seemingly headed to the Amazon no-booking-fee tickets store are a Tom Jones concert, Bestival and Camp Bestival. Geraldine Wilson, GM for Amazon Local in the UK said: "We wanted to offer a convenient way for Amazon customers to book tickets to a wide selection of music, theatre and comedy events around the UK in a few clicks".

and two former AOL executives have raised $20 million in investment for a new app, Bkstg, that aims to provide a one-stop shop for any one artist's fans, offering ticketing, video, merch and social networking all in one place. Among the investors that Erika Nardini and Ran Harnevo have recruited are Live Nation, Scooter Braun Projects, Modest! Management and the Three Six Zero Group

Amazon tops Apple in UK music retail market

Amazon’s share of total spend on the category overtook Apple’s for the first time, according to freshly published BPI statistics. Across physical and digital sales, Amazon took 27% of all spending in the UK in 2014, with iTunes on 26.7%. The Kantar Worldpanel data, published in the BPI Music Market Yearbook 2015 shows that Amazon took a 9% share of total revenue through its digital store in 2014. However, Amazon also took a 17.1% share of the value market (across albums and singles) through its home delivery offering – bringing its total above iTunes. HMV has a 15.4% market share

http://www.bpi.co.uk/products/102-bpi-yearbook-series.aspx

Amazon launches music streaming

Amazon has launched its much talked about streaming music service in the US, offering access to "over a million songs" to its Amazon Prime customers but seemingly launched without a deal with Universal in place - and the streaming service offers ad-free access to a relatively small catalogue of songs (compared to the likes of Spotify, et al), which is shrunk further by the absence of any Universal material.

Amazon download market share up to 22%

A new NPD Group report shows that while Apple iTunes still dominates the digital music download market with 63%, AmazonMP3 continued to increase its market share  to a very healthy 22% of the market. NPD cites the launch of Amazon's own tablets and competitive pricing as factors in the increase. The report also shows that despite a widespread belief that streaming service subscribers and users don’t need to buy music because of streaming options,  streamers are actually much more likely than the average consumer to buy music downloads

Amazon now leading UK retailer

Amazon now accounts for a 21.1% of the UK entertainment retail market, according Kantar Worldpanel. As previously reported, according to the retail stats, Amazon overtook HMV (16.6%) as the country's biggest entertainment retailer late last year.  


HMV's market share dropped 0.8% and supermarkets are also feeling the squeeze as Tesco dropped 1.7% and Asda 0.2% points in the past year. Sainsbury's is the notable exception to this rule, increasing its share of the market to 5.3% as a result of a strong focus on its video offer.

Gaga tops 1.15 million US sales in first week

A 99 cent full album download promotion by Amazon.com has pushed first-week sales of Lady Gaga’s new album “Born This Way” to 1.15 million units in the USA according to Billboard and despite technical glitches, Amazon cOntributed approximately 440,000 sales. At retail, the album reportedly sold at least 500,000 units on Monday; it has been made available at a wide range of 20,000 stores, including CVS, Whole Foods and Walgreens.