Industry News

Ticketfly hits new heights for ‘up-for-sale’ Pandora

Ticketfly saw revenue soar during Q1 2017 despite another poor three-month period for parent company Pandora.

The ticketing operator generated a 25 per cent year-on-year surge in service revenue to $27.8m (£21.5m/€26.0m).

Ticketfly now accounts for around nine per cent of Pandora, which has been the subject of takeover rumours. The internet radio giant’s total turnover was $316m, which was up six per cent year-on-year, with losses widening from $115.1m to $132.3m.

Pandora, which bought Ticketfly for $450m in October 2015, said it expects full-year revenue in the range of $1.50bn-$1.65bn. Pandora recently announced an injection of $150m of new capital from private-equity firm KKR.

Tim Westergren, founder and chief executive of Pandora, said: “Our Q1 results were consistent with our expectations and demonstrated Pandora’s ability to improve ad monetization, while controlling costs and evolving our consumer experience in ways that enhance usage trends of our most engaged listeners.”

Very smart people

Ticketfly was founded in 2008 by Andrew Dreskin, who sold Ticketweb to Ticketmaster for $35m in 2000. Last year Dreskin hailed Pandora’s impact on the ticket vendor over the 12 months since it was acquired.

“It has greatly exceeded our expectations so far,” he told Yahoo. “These are very smart people at Pandora, and they have a very sophisticated strategy team – they didn’t just do this willy-nilly. They did a lot of examination and testing before the acquisition, first with live streaming by webcasting Jack White from Madison Square Garden. Some 720,000 people created [a White] station to listen to that stream. They streamed a Mumford & Sons concert and a million people created a station. So clearly Pandora users were interested in live music.”

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