Of all the new Open Graph apps launched tonight, Ticketmaster’s new Facebook experience is the most impressive. Sure it can share that you’ve “bought” tickets, but lots of apps have similar publishing functionality. What makes Ticketmaster’s app cool is that it pulls your Facebook profile’s music app activity from services such as Spotify or Rdio, and recommends nearby concerts of artists you actually listen to, not just those you say you Like.

Ticketmaster has come a long way in the two years since Nathan Hubbard became CEO following its merger with LiveNation. It now shows you its service fees up front rather than tacking them on as you checkout. This pissed off artists and venues who thought it would scare away sales, but Ticketmaster did it in the name of transparency.

Executive VP of ecommerce Kip Levin tells me that for a long time the company was scapegoat for all of the live event industry’s problems. Now it’s pushing back and putting the customers first — something people might not expect just because it charges those pesky service fees.

In August Ticketmaster began allowing you to tag the seats your purchase with your Facebook profile. That way friends who are deciding what seats to buy can see where yours are select ones close to you. People are a lot more willing to buy a single ticket to an assigned seat show if they can sit next to their friends. This is one example of how optimizing for the customer experience can also benefit the company’s bottom line.

Ticketmaster’s new canvas app brings the entire event discovery and ticket purchase flow within Facebook. You’re shown a feed of concerts your friends have RSVP’d to or shared that they’ve bought tickets to, followed by personal recommendations. Thanks to Facebook data permissions, it can suggest nearby events based on your Likes and listening activity without having to ask your preferences.

Several competitors launched Facebook Open Graph ticketing apps including Ticketfly, but none provide listening-based recommendations or interactive seat maps.

Many web services that release Facebook apps primarily use the social network as a distribution and marketing channel. The best ones, like Ticketmaster, request your personal data and responsibly apply it make their products better. It’s already working. I was just suggested an upcoming show by one of my favorite bands Neon Indian, who I listen to a lot but never got around to Liking.

If you’re a member of BlackBerry Beta Zone, you should be happy to hear that Ticketmaster has just released the Ticketmaster for BlackBerry app in beta version 2.0. This means you can select the event of your choosing straight from your phone, buy tickets, and be on your way, all from the comfort of that QWERTY keyboard.

The app has been revamped from the floor up and now sports a nice, clean looking UI. But the real goodies lie in the updated Search feature, which gives you a few different ways to find the right event. For one, you can do a basic search by artist, teams, or venues. GPS steps in and makes sure your search is filtered to present only events happening nearby, so you don’t get all excited about some Black Eyed Peas concert that’s happening 200 miles away. Searches can also be further filtered based on the date of the event. You can choose between “this weekend,” “the next 90 days,” or build your own custom date filter.

Another cool enhancement is Calendar integration. With Ticketmaster for BlackBerry Beta 2.0, users who have purchased tickets from their phone can now sync the date with their BlackBerry calendar to stay organized. Overall, this is a nice future addition to the BlackBerry App World, and we hope it makes its way out to the masses sooner rather than later.

[via BlackBerry Blog]

Online ticket seller Eventbrite raised a $20 million round of funding from DAG Ventures, Sequioa Capital, and Tenaya Capital (formerly Lehman Brothers Venture Partners). DAG led the round (Sequioa led the last one). The D round is twice the amount of capital as all three previous rounds combined, bringing the total raised bey the company to $29.5 million.

CEO Kevin Hartz tells me he still had $5 million in the bank from his previous rounds of funding, but he is now ready to expand aggressively. Only about 15 percent of Eventbrite’s gross ticket sales come from outside the U.S., and he wants to make that bigger. (In Europe, Amiando is a competitor).

Tickets sold through Eventbrite overall are on track to double this year to $200 million worth of tickets, and it has already processed 7.5 million tickets this year. About half of those tickets are free. The average price of a ticket is $60. Eventbrite only takes a fee for tickets with a price, but all those free events are terrific marketing for the service. “The No. 1 source of new customers for Eventbrite are people who have attended an event,” says Hartz.

Hartz also wants to make Eventbrite itself into more of a destination site for discovering events: “Today, there is only one destination site, Ticketmaster, to find events that are going on. We think that needs to change”

Eventbrite recently took steps to add more social discovery features to its site by showing people who sign in through Facebook the events their friends are attending. Social sharing is a huge driver of traffic and ticket sales for Eventbrite. Last quarter, Facebook passed Google as the single largest driver of traffic to Eventbrite.

In case you were wondering (I’m looking at you Levine): Live Nation and sister company Ticketmaster have jointly announced that they’ll be the ones powering the concert listings feature on iTunes 10.

In addition, the company said it will deliver a “way for millions of iTunes users to purchase concert tickets at Livenation.com and Ticketmaster.com“.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think CEO Steve Jobs left that part out of his keynote, although the official press release does mention Live Nation briefly, indicating only that the company will be providing tour info for Concert pages.

Says Michael Rapino, President and CEO of Live Nation Entertainment:

“Our partnership with Apple is a key part of our strategy to empower fans with the greatest access to live entertainment.”

So there you have it. It’s not just a new logo and a feature-poor social network, folks.

For what it’s worth: Live Nation Entertainment is a logical partner if only because of its sheer size (for better or worse). In 2009, the company said it sold a grand total of 140 million tickets, promoted 21,000 concerts, partnered with 850 sponsors and averaged 25 million unique monthly users of its e-commerce sites.

Ticketmaster, obviously, is one of the largest e-commerce and ticketing sites on the Web, with operations in 18 markets worldwide.

If ticketing startup Eventbrite wants to become the Ticketmaster of do-it-yourself events, it just added a new board member who might have some ideas on how to get there. The company just added Sean Moriarty to its board of directors. Moriarty was previously the CEO of Ticketmaster, which he helped build into an events juggernaut between 2005 and March, 2009, when he left the company.

Whereas Ticketmaster rules ticketing for large events at concerts and sports stadiums, “Eventbrite is coming at event management from a grassroots effort,” says Moriarty. “It is effectively providing tools that did not previously exist.” Eventbrite lets anyone create and sell tickets for events ranging from backyard BBQs to TechCrunch 50 (we use Eventbrite for many of our conferences).

Last year, Eventbrite sold more than $100 million worth of tickets. Eventbrite takes various fees for paid tickets, including 2.5 percent of the ticket price, plus another 3 percent if it acts as the payment processor instead of a credit card or Paypal. (Watch our recent interview with the founders and Sequoia VC Roelof Botha).
“We want to do a billion dollars” worth of ticket sales, CEO Kevin Hartz told me about a month ago. Over the next few years, that is certainly possible.

By that point, Ticketmaster had better watch out.

MySpace is the big lottery winner here. They bought iLike for $20 million in August. What they got: a talented (literally) team that is starting to fill the executive ranks at MySpace, the biggest music application on Facebook, and, it turns out, a deal with Google that is now sending massive traffic flow directly to MySpace Music.

Our understanding from sources is that MySpace made an offer to iLike without knowing about the Google deal. Supposedly, since iLike was under NDA, all they knew was that iLike had a big partnership opportunity with some big company, nothing more. In hindsight the iLike deal looks smart even without Google. Add that in and it looks absolutely brilliant. I’m no fan of MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, but I’ll give the man credit here.

Giving Facebook The Benefit Of The Doubt

Facebook decided not to aggresively pursue iLike. They seem to have firmly moved away from any desire to deal with content directly, so this looks less like a mistake and more like a strategic decision.

But one thing is clear. Facebook utterly failed to execute on their music strategy from last year, even while trying to work via a partner application to avoid direct contact with content. Meanwhile, Google stepped in and quickly brought streaming music directly to users, without paying anything at all for it.

iLike CEO and now MySpace exec Ali Partovi, speaking at the launch event last night, didn’t hold any punches against Facebook. He gave huge credit to Google for pulling off a win-win-win-win (labels, google, users, MySpace/LaLa) in the difficult online music space. And he noted that “others have tried or are still trying and have failed miserably.” He was quite clearly referring to Facebook.

The truth is that we don’t know if Facebook flailed on a huge opportunity to get into the Google search stream, or if they just decided they don’t want the hassle of dealing with music directly. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. And they certainly had no idea of the Google deal back when they were trying to buy iLike anyway.

Ticketmaster Flubs It

None of Facebook’s excuses (didn’t know about the Google deal, strategically not what they want, etc.) apply to Ticketmaster. The company was a big shareholder in iLike, had a board seat, and certainly new every detail of the Google deal. They could easily have acquired iLike, probably for not much more cash than the $13.3 million they already had invested. But instead they let the company go to MySpace, knowing full well that they were enabling a huge potential competitor.

If Ticketmaster had acquired iLike all that Google music search traffic would be under their control. Click throughs to the iLike site could be monetized through event ticket sales. It would probably be a matter of months, not years, before they got their investment back in additional ticket sales.

And what’s worse is that MySpace now controls all that traffic. MySpace actually has a much more complete worldwide database of concert events than even Ticketmaster has, and they already flow through a lot of traffic to ticket sales at Ticketmaster and competitors. Now that database is combined with iLike’s impressive concert discovery and alert product. When you plug Google search traffic into all of that, its got to be scary for Ticketmaster:

“MySpace has the world’s largest database of live events, and iLike has already built some of the world’s best concert-discovery features available online,” Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music, wrote in a blog post. “We’re delighted to have implemented the first structured integration of concert data into Google search, and this is only the beginning of our efforts to innovate in the live event space.”

We frankly can’t see any reason at all for Ticketmaster to let iLike go to a potential competitor, particularly with this Google deal locked up. Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff certainly knew what was happening. So why did he make such a huge misstep? Possibly because he’s in the middle of a divestiture of topline assets as part of a merger with Live Nation. Azoff is rumored to be looking for a huge personal payout as part of that deal, and may even be spinning himself off along with assets.

In other words, maybe Azoff couldn’t care less about the future of Ticketmaster.

With the proposed $2.5 billion merger between TicketMaster and Live Nation looming large, many venue owners and promoters are up in arms, deeming the deal anti-competitive and monopolistic (they may be right – the deal is being examined for possible anti-trust violations). Now ShowClix, a TicketMaster competitor that launched in early 2007, is launching the Fair Ticketing Fund, setting aside up to $5 million to entice venues and promoters away from the pending Live Nation Entertainment goliath. Other ticket vendors are also beginning to offer similar deals, including TicketBiscuit, which launched a $10 million fund last week.

For those who aren’t familiar with the ticketing business, here’s a bit of a primer. TicketMaster has long been contracting venues into exclusive deals, promising some portion of the service fees (also known as convenience or venue fees) the site racks up as an incentive for them to sign on. TicketMaster has become notorious for gouging customers with these fees, and many fear that with the Live Nation deal they’ll only continue to rise higher.

Smaller ticket companies like ShowClix don’t typically charge service fees that are nearly as high as TicketMaster’s so they usually can’t promise the same returns to venues. That’s where the their new funds come in: each is promising venues that they’ll use the new funds to compensate for the income they stand to lose from leaving TicketMaster. In effect, they’re giving venues opposed to the new deal a chance to protest it without doing too much damage to their bank accounts.

However, while ShowClix and TicketBiscuit may be giving away money for now, this is hardly a charity – any venues looking to take advantage of the Fair Ticketing Fund will be signing on with ShowClix under an exclusive year-long deal (which is fairly common in the industry), and TicketBiscuit will also mandate an exclusive deal. Still, it’s nice to see these smaller entities take on TicketMaster – I’m getting tired of “convenience” fees that cost a third as much as the ticket itself.

This could be good news for the music industry, which suffers from steadily declining record sales and stands to benefit from more ticket sales for live performances. Or just another last-ditch measure to save itself from an inevitable death and rebirth.

According to Paidcontent, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have entered into a definitive agreement to merge into an entity called Live Nation Entertainment.

From the release:

The companies will be combined in a tax-free, all-stock merger of equals with a combined enterprise value of approximately $2.5 billion. Under the agreement, Ticketmaster shareholders will receive 1.384 shares of Live Nation common stock for each share of Ticketmaster they own, subject to certain adjustments defined within the agreement. Live Nation and Ticketmaster shareholders will each own approximately 50 percent of the combined company. The new company anticipates generating approximately $40 million of operating synergies through the combination of their ticketing, marketing, data centers and back-office functions.

Ticketmaster specializes in online ticketing whereas Live Nation focuses on concert promotions. They will still have to go through regularly review before the merger can be completed, and as Paidcontent points out, there will be those in the music industry that create stiff resistance to this consolidation of power (especially with Ticketmaster’s reputation for monopolizing ticket sales on its own).

Eliot Van Buskirk from Wired suggests that the merger “could lead to a dramatic change in how event tickets are sold: from the fixed price norm that often results in quick sellouts for popular shows to an auction-based model that legitimizes what scalpers have always done.” The rationale:

If Live Nation and Ticketmaster merge, the combined entity could bypass the primary ticketing system partially or completely, forcing fans to bid against each other for tickets in Ticketmaster’s TicketsNow secondary market rather than selling them at a fixed price in the primary ticket market, the way they have done in the past.

This is not the first time Live Nation and Ticketmaster will have worked together. According to Barry Diller, who’s Chairman of Ticketmaster, “It was less than two months ago that Ticketmaster ended its 10-year partnership with Live Nation.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported that the two companies were close to making a merger announcement early Monday morning.

This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573

That is the equivalent of about 57 startups with ten people each. And those are just the ones that we or other news outlets have been able to confirm. Our list of tips is much longer than that and we are working through it to confirm as many as we can. For instance, Cake Financial has laid off 30 percent of its staff, or 6 people.

Another company with unreported layoffs earlier this week was Meraki, which I’ve confirmed let go 20 percent of its staff (10 people). That makes Meraki the third Sequoia-backed company to announce layoffs this week. (The other two were Mahalo and imeem). Sequoia urged all of its portfolio companies to make cut-backs earlier this month.

At least most of these startups are already done with their layoffs, unlike Yahoo which announced a 10 percent cut is coming but won’t say who exactly is losing their jobs for another few weeks. Layoffs are bad enough, but don’t prolong the misery.

This past week alone, tech companies have laid off 13,809 people:

Company–––––––––Layoffs

Xerox————3,000
Daptiv————–21
Haute Secure———3
Cake Financial——–6
Mercent————-6
Dell————-8,900
imeem————-20
Mahalo————-6
TicketMaster——300
Eons—————8
Veoh————–15
Yahoo———-1,500
Wikia—————3
Meraki————-10
Break.com———-11

Total———-13,809

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article.

London based Seatwave, like StubHub (acquired by eBay for $310 million) and TicketsNow (acquired by Ticketmaster for $265 million) resells tickets to major events. The company was founded in 2006 by Joe Cohen, formerly with Ticketmaster and Match.com.

According to PEHub, the European market hasn’t had a strong online reselling presence, particularly compared to the United States.

Scalping tickets (reselling tickets) is not the easiest market to be in, with the practice frowned upon by many, and often illegal as well. The resale of football (soccer) tickets is illegal in the United Kingdom unless the resale is authorized by the organizer of the match, such as an under an agreement Seatwave competitor Viagogo has.

Many of the tickets that scalpers, er, brokers, sell on these secondary marketplaces are initially purchased from the Ticketmasters of the world. So the markup is a missed opportunity for Ticketmaster, whose own TicketExchange has shown lackluster performance.

The TicketsNow deal shows how hot the secondary event ticket market is becoming, and Ticketmaster’s entry will likely help legitimize the sector (see our previous coverage on some of the problems with the industry).

The WSJ, which broke the story, reports (subscription required):

Ticketmaster President and Chief Executive Sean Moriarty said the company plans to share revenue from its new division with clients that own venues or promote events, although he said details on how the money would be distributed aren’t final. He said the move highlights a shift in the way ticket resellers are perceived, both by the public and by concert-industry participants. Where resellers once were viewed as shady scalpers, now, thanks largely to the Internet, they are becoming more respectable.

“Clients who five years ago were not willing to allow a ticket to be resold now want a piece of it,” Mr. Moriarty said. The size of the secondary ticket market is hard to judge, but estimates range from $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year in the U.S.

That’s a nice growth market for a business that is about to be spun off as its own stock.

According to comScore, TicketsNow had 1.5 million unique visitors in December, about the same it did a year ago, while StubHub attracted 3.4 million and has been growing nicely under eBay’s wing (although it took a major hit in November).

That puts the value of iLike at a whopping $53.2 million. The company launched less than two months ago, on October 25.

We love the iLike service, which provides an excellent iTunes plugin that constantly analyzes what music you listen to and recommends new stuff. But what I don’t want to see is a “buy tickets” button next to each artist, effectively turning iTunes into a billboard. It’s not clear that’s what the companies intend to do, though. All they are saying now is that the agreement will “enable iLike to extend its reach while enabling Ticketmaster to engage consumers with deeply-integrated music and event discovery services intended to drive ticket sales.”

Previous investors in iLike include Khosla Ventures and Bob Pittman.