YouTube partners with Ticketmaster to sell artists' show tickets, reduce pirated vids

[Len]

YouTube has partnered with Ticketmaster and is rolling out a feature that makes it easy to purchase concert tickets when watching an artist’s official music videos on YouTube.

With the update, an artist’s tour dates will be listed under their official YouTube music video, and clicking a tour date will lead users to Ticketmaster to purchase the tickets. The feature is initially rolling out to all artists that have Ticketmaster shows in North America and is planned to rollout globally.

YouTube’s partnership with Ticketmaster and new feature are important for the following reasons:
 

• Music is one of the most popular types of content on YouTube. Music videos account for 30% of all time spent on YouTube and represent 94% of the 250 most-viewed videos on the platform, per the VAB. This indicates artists have a good chance of generating additional ticket sales through the new feature, as there is already a large audience for music on YouTube.
• YouTube can strengthen its relationships record labels. Some record labels have felt that YouTube hasn't paid enough in fees for the music videos it hosts on its platform, according to the Guardian. Ticket sales provide another stream of revenue that can appease record labels that feel monetization from YouTube streams is too low. YouTube said it paid out over $1 billion to the music industry in advertising alone in 2016.
• It can minimize streams of unofficial music videos. With the ability to monetize from ticket sales, artists will likely look to generate as much traffic as possible to their official music videos. This could cause artists to be more proactive in flagging unofficial channels to have the content taken down, which could make pirated music video content less prevalent on YouTube