Ticketmaster taps Post Malone for Apple integration
Ticketmaster has announced a series of new integrations with Apple, alongside a partnership with American rapper and singer Post Malone.
Fans can now discover Ticketmaster tickets through song-identification app Shazam with additional touchpoints across Apple Music, Apple Maps, and iOS Spotlight Search.
Bonus content such as the tour setlist playlist, Apple Watch faces, phone wallpapers and photos will also be available for featured artists.
On Shazam, fans can “save” their favourite artists to be notified of future content, tickets and more.
Fans will also be able to follow along with Malone’s tour on a new Apple Music Guide on Apple Maps and see his favorite stops
Malone is the first artist to be featured in the ‘360 programme’ for his F-1 Trillion tour, which kicked off this weekend and will span 21 dates in the US. In advance of the tour, he shared a preview of his tour setlist exclusively on Apple Music.
Fans will also be able to follow along with Malone’s tour on a new Apple Music Guide on Apple Maps and see his stops on the road – while discovering new ways to find Post Malone tickets at the venues near them.
Ticketmaster first announced the partnership with Shazam in July, following on from similar partnerships with TikTok and Snapchat.
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First civil trial over Astroworld tragedy delayed
The first civil trial for Travis Scott, Live Nation and others over their role in the 2021 disaster at the Astroworld music festival has been delayed.
Ten people died and hundreds more were injured during the fatal crowd crush at the 5 November 2021 festival at NRG Park in Houston, US.
A trial had been finally set to start on Monday (May 6) but proceedings have now been pushed back indefinitely due to an unresolved battle over whether Apple Inc., which filmed Scott’s Astroworld performance for an exclusive livestream, should be involved in the case.
In a ruling last Thursday (2 May), a Texas appeals court refused to let the case move forward until it can rule on the ongoing dispute over Apple’s involvement. It gave Apple until May 10 to file paperwork in the case.
Hundreds of people have sued over the Astroworld tragedy, collectively seeking billions in potential damages. After years of discovery and depositions, the first trial – a wrongful death case filed by family of Madison Dubiski, a 23-year-old who died at Astroworld – was due to start today.
“Allowing plaintiffs to pursue Apple under state tort law for exercising its free speech rights would have a significant chilling effect”
Apple was named as a defendant in many of those cases, including the one filed by the Dubiskis. The victims claim Apple directly contributed to the disaster with the placement of its equipment: “Apple’s role in the tragedy is straightforward: it reduced the available crowd space, when available space was a matter of life or limb.”
The tech giant has strongly denied those claims. In a motion last month demanding to be dismissed from the litigation, Apple argued that simply livestreaming the event doesn’t make the company liable for the disaster. The company said it had been filming the deadly event as a member of the media, meaning it was insulated from such lawsuits by the First Amendment.
“Allowing plaintiffs to pursue Apple under state tort law for exercising its free speech rights would have a significant chilling effect,” the company wrote last month in a motion. “Recognising such a legal duty in this case would be entirely unprecedented and would impose significant burdens on broadcasters and livestreamers that are frequently bystanders at events.”
In a ruling last month, Judge Kristen Hawkins denied that motion, leaving Apple to face the trial alongside Scott, Live Nation and the other defendants.
Subsequently, the tech giant filed an immediate appeal with a state appellate court seeking to overturn that ruling – a move that, under Texas state law, imposes an automatic pause on any upcoming trial proceedings.
“These free speech and free press issues warrant appellate resolution before Apple faces trial”
“Apple recognizes that the trial date is imminent and that both the court and all parties have devoted much time and effort to preparing the case for trial,” said Apple’s attorneys on Tuesday (30 April). “These free speech and free press issues warrant appellate resolution before Apple faces trial.”
Attorneys for Dubiski’s family criticised the move and, in a Wednesday (1 May) motion seeking to dismiss the appeal and stick to the trial date, they argued that Apple was no more shielded by the First Amendment than a Houston television station “whose news van negligently crashes into a pedestrian while covering a story”.
“The Dubiski family … have waited patiently for their day in court, only to watch Apple shamelessly seek to manipulate the system,” lawyers for the victim’s family wrote. “Litigation is not supposed to work this way. This court should promptly dismiss this appeal.”
But in an order late Thursday (2 May), the appeals court refused to unfreeze the case ahead of the planned trial date. Instead, it ordered Apple to respond by May 10 to the plaintiffs’ request to dismiss the case.
Last month, Travis Scott’s attempts to be removed from civil litigation were denied, however Drake, who appeared as a special guest during Scott’s headline set, was dismissed from the lawsuits.
Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino has also been ordered to give testimony in the suits brought against his company.
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Apple’s Shazam adds new section for concerts
Shazam, the Apple-owned music identification app, has introduced a new feature that will allow users to find nearby shows through recommendations based on their Shazam histories.
The new ‘Concerts’ feature will recommend events, allow users to save and set reminders about upcoming shows and view available tickets, with options to buy them through BandsInTown or other ticket providers.
It also offers exclusives from certain artists that will be available for users to unlock, such as behind-the-scenes videos, Apple Watch faces, tour photos and setlists, among other things.
The feature is already available for iOS users within the My Music section of the app and will be coming to Android soon.
The new feature will recommend events, allow users to save and set reminders about upcoming shows and view available tickets
It has also been incorporated into Spotlight, where iPhone users can now search for an artist and get concert and ticketing information immediately in iOS 17.
It marks the latest Apple feature to incorporate live music data and information into its functionality, after additions to Apple Maps and the Set Lists feature within Apple Music.
The Concerts feature builds on a previous collaboration with BandsInTown that was initially announced in March 2022.
Through that partnership, Shazam users could search for an artist and pull up their forthcoming tour information using the BandsInTown database of shows for over 500,000 artists.
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Streaming companies up live presence with new concerts
Apple and Amazon, whose Apple Music and Amazon Music platforms are respectively the second and third most popular music streaming services worldwide, have announced plans for new live events this summer.
Ecommerce giant Amazon will expand this year’s Prime Day – a Black Friday-like discount day for members of its Prime loyalty programme – with a new entertainment component: a Prime Day concert headlined by Taylor Swift.
Available to view from 9pm EST (1am GMT) next Wednesday (11 July) on Amazon’s Prime Video service, the concert’s all-female line-up also includes Dua Lipa, SZA and Becky, as well as actor Jane Lynch, who will host the event.
“We can’t wait to celebrate Prime Day with an extraordinary night of unforgettable performances, for members around the globe,” says Steve Boom, VP of Amazon Music. “Prime Day brings members the best of both entertainment and shopping. To celebrate, we’ve curated a line-up across multiple genres with performances from artists our customers love.
“We’re looking forward to celebrating Prime Day with this can’t-miss, one-of-a-kind event.”
Amazon previous organised a series of shows in the UK, dubbed Prime Live Events, though these were wound up in early 2018 following the shutdown of its Amazon Tickets business.
“We’re looking forward to celebrating Prime Day with this can’t-miss, one-of-a-kind event”
Apple, meanwhile, is taking Apple Music’s Up Next programme and playlist, which focuses on emerging artists, to retail stores across Europe and the US under the banner Up Next Live.
Up Next artists, including Bad Bunny, Daniel Caesar, Khalid, Ashley McBryde, King Princess, Lewis Capaldi and Jessie Reyez, will each play an intimate show in Apple shops in Italy, France, London and the US, starting with Latin star Bad Bunny at Apple Piazza Liberty in Milan on 9 July.
Apple operated its own music festival, Apple Music Festival (formerly the iTunes Festival), in London from 2007 until its cancellation in 2017, and has also sponsored select tours.
Commenting on his involvement with the Up Next initiative, Puerto Rican-born Bad Bunny says: “The impact [of being part of Up Next] can be seen in everything, in numbers, in plays, in shows. There are a lot of fans that, when I go out in the street in the US, people who do not speak Spanish, I think they will not know me and they stop me, they ask me for pictures and they sing my songs…
“It helped me very much to make myself known in a market different from mine, not only the US, but in places where Spanish is not spoken or where perhaps Latin music does not dominate, exposing my music and giving people the opportunity to get to know what I do.”
Streaming market leader Spotify has also taken its playlists on the road, including the Latin-led ¡Viva Latino! Live, grime-focused Who We Be Live and US hip hop-orientated RapCaviar Live.
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Apple Music Festival axed after a decade
Apple Music Festival (AMF) is no more, Apple has confirmed, bringing to an end its decade-long run bringing arena-sized acts to mid-sized London venues.
The festival previously took place in the last two weeks of September, but a line-up announcement had been conspicuously absent this year, leading to speculation it had been axed. The Roundhouse, the 3,300-cap. venue where AMF had taken place since 2009, had been telling customers the festival was no longer going ahead, and Apple confirmed the cancellation to MBW yesterday.
The annual concert series, which distributed free tickets to competition winners, was first held as iTunes Festival at ICA, moving to Koko for 2008 and the Roundhouse in 2009. It was rebranded Apple Music Festival in 2015.
Apple is still involved in live music, sponsoring various shows, notably Drake’s Summer Sixteen tour and, per MBW, London dates by Haim and Skepta and Brooklyn shows by Arcade Fire.
Artists who played iTunes/Apple Music Festival between 2007 and 2016 include Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Adele, Elton John, Oasis, Britney Spears, One Direction and Take That.
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Is Apple going to disable iPhone cameras at gigs?
Apple has been granted a patent that could allow it to block filming or taking photos on iPhones at concerts.
US patent 9,380,225, first applied for 2011, relates to the detection of an infrared signal by the phone’s camera, and concerns itself primarily with potential applications for augmented reality – for example, using infrared transmitters at museums to beam information to iPhone users photographing a particular exhibit.
However, the patent also describes a secondary application that will be particularly interesting for venues, stating that “[infrared] transmitter[s] can be located in areas where capturing pictures and videos is prohibited (eg a concert or a classified facility) and the transmitters can generate infrared signals with encoded data that includes commands temporarily disabling recording functions”, and even includes a handy diagram showing how it could work:
IQ earlier this month reported on a study by MIDiA Research which revealed digital and mobile now dominate event discovery, ticket buying and sharing and opined that: “The use of smartphones in events is an invaluable form of brand promotion and can be leveraged to build engaged future attendee lists through tactics such as image competitions on social platforms.”
Clearly someone at Apple disagrees – although the California-based company has not announced any plans to include the functionality in its next model, the iPhone 7. Apple has sold well in excess of 700 million iPhones worldwide since the phone’s introduction in 2007.
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Fandango to sell tickets directly through iOS 10
Fandango, the movie ticketing company which last month signed a groundbreaking agreement to sell film tickets through social media app Snapchat, today announced another major coup in the form of a similar deal with Apple.
American iPhone and iPad users will, with the launch later this year of incoming operating system iOS 10, be able to find and buy film tickets through the inbuilt Messages chat client.
Customers will also be able to pay for their tickets using Apple’s Apple Pay mobile payment service.
“Fandango has worked for nearly a decade on new ways to enhance and simplify the moviegoing experience for Apple users, and we’re thrilled to introduce what we think is the ultimate social commerce solution for moviegoers – [a] truly a first-of-its-kind product,” says Fandango president Paul Yanover. “With Fandango in Messages, we’ll be able to quickly activate people’s desire to see a movie with friends and family and get them ready for the theatre by easily purchasing tickets, all with a few taps within their Messages conversation.”
Apple has sold well in excess of 700 million iPhones worldwide, and as of January 75% of users of iOS devices were using the latest version, iOS 9. iOS 10 will be released this autumn.
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Apple Music turns concert promoter for Drake tour
Drake and Future have announced a new concert tour, Summer Sixteen, in support of the former’s fourth studio album, Views from the 6.
The 32-date North American tour, promoted exclusively by Live Nation, is notable for being billed as presented by ‘Them Boys up to Something’ (a lyric from the rappers’ song, ‘Jumpman’) and Apple Music – the first time the music streaming service has lent its brand to a series of externally promoted concerts.
Apple’s iTunes Festival at the Roundhouse in London was rebranded the Apple Music Festival for 2015.
Views from the 6 will be an Apple Music exclusive upon release this Friday (29 April). The service has reportedly added over 12 million subscribers since its launch in June last year.
Streaming rival Tidal has also dipped its toe into live music, notably producing the Tidal X: 10/20 concert with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Usher and TI at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, in October to celebrate the service achieving a million paying subscribers.
The Summer Sixteen tour kicks off at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas, on 20 July and closes on 17 September at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena.