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Lollapalooza India ‘will break even by next year’

The organisers of Lollapalooza India say the festival is on course to break even next year as it celebrates a successful second edition.

More than 60,000 fans over two days gathered at Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse from 27-28 January to see headliners Sting, Jonas Brothers, Halsey and OneRepublic.

Held across four stages, the lineup also included acts such as Keane, Lauv, Jungle, Royal Blood, JPEGMAFIA, Meduza, Malaa, Caribou, The Rose and Eric Nam.

The festival was produced by co-founder Perry Farrell, Live Nation’s C3 Presents and Indian ticketing giant BookMyShow, which has expanded into staging live events.

Speaking to Mint, BookMyShow’s chief of business, live entertainment, Owen Roncon says the event is projected to become financially stable by year three – in line with expectations. Tickets started at 5,999 Indian rupee (€66.50).

“Lolla will break even by next year for sure. We are in the ballpark and it’s going per the plan with no massive deviation”

“Lolla will break even by next year for sure,” says Roncon. “We are in the ballpark and it’s going per the plan with no massive deviation.

“The kind of brand pickup that we’ve seen in Lolla is unprecedented. I don’t think there’s any other IP that has picked up this kind of inventory from the market. And it’s only increasing. I think by next year, we’ll be able to do far more for brands, and our plans are bigger and better for the brands themselves. So therefore I think that that those scales are gonna get better.”

Last year’s inaugural Lolla India featured performances from local and international artists including Imagine Dragons, The Strokes, AP Dhillon, Cigarettes After Sex, Divine, the F16s, Jackson Wang, Imanbek, Greta Van Fleet, The Wombats and Diplo. Its debut in Asia meant the brand has now grown to eight countries on four continents, including editions in the US, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France and Sweden.

Mumbai-bosed BookMyShow also launched rock festival Badland in Bengaluru last month, headlined by Deep Purple and Goo Goo Dolls, and is planning a hip-hop festival in Delhi. Roncon reveals the firm is focusing its attention on Mumbai, Bengaluru and New Delhi for large-scale events, and is exploring venue development in various cities as it seeks to improve the country’s live entertainment infrastructure.

“Those can be shared with others too and everyone’s production cost can come down, it brings down the ticket prices and gives talent a platform,” he explains. “We’re looking at that very, very aggressively and I think in the next year or two, you should see a few results.”

 


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India stakes its claim as global entertainment hub

India is enhancing its claim as a global entertainment hub as it entices a growing number of international stars and festival brands to the country.

50 Cent, Westlife, Deep Purple, Goo Goo Dolls, Bastille and Kodaline are among the big-name acts set to perform before the end of the year, while Ed Sheeran last week announced his + – = ÷ x (Mathematics) tour will visit Mumbai in 2024.

The concert at Mahalaxmi Racecourse on 16 March will be the first time Sheeran has played in India since 2017. According to BookMyShow Live, which is co-promoting the concert with AEG Presents, the gig will feature a 360° circular and revolving stage – a first for India.

“The future of events in India is on the cusp of a remarkable transformation,” says Owen Roncon, BookMyShow’s chief of business, live entertainment.

“Our endeavour at BookMyShow Live is to consistently push the boundaries of how live entertainment is experienced here at par with global standards. In line with that, we are thrilled to bring this ground-breaking, production wonder with the 360-degree circular, revolving stage to the Indian audience for the Ed Sheeran: + – = ÷ x Tour (Mathematics Tour).

“The future of events in India is on the cusp of a remarkable transformation”

“With this innovative production, auditory experience and the technological integration, the tour comes to India as a work of art where technology waltzes with creativity, weaving an enchanting blend of visuals and sound; ensuring in fact that it truly is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

India has already enjoyed a bumper 2023 calendar, with concerts from the likes of Backstreet Boys, John Legend and Bonobo, and festivals including Vh1 Supersonic, Mahindra Blues Festival and Lollapalooza drawing yet more household names.

Live Nation and BookMyShow teamed up on the very first Lollapalooza India at Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse, featuring Imagine Dragons, The Strokes, and Diplo alongside Indian-born rapper AP Dhillon, Delhi-based singer-songwriter Prateek Kuhad and others. The event drew 60,000 fans over two days, with 40 artists performing across four stages on a 50-acre site.

James Craven, Live Nation president, Middle East, says Lollapalooza coming to Mumbai is a great example of the market’s growing importance.

“It’s really exciting to see global markets open up to music and artists from the Indian sub-continent, as well as seeing how the Indian market continues to open up for international acts,” says Craven in the IQ’s Global Promoters Report. “Expanding global touring routes for artists is key to their growth and that of the industry, and India will play a key role in that going forwards.”

“Our endeavour is to consistently push the boundaries of how live is experienced here at par with global standards”

Lollapalooza isn’t the only global festival brand to plant a flag in India. Palm Tree Festival, an event founded by renowned Norwegian producer Kygo and his manager Myles Shear, will debut in Mumbai this November.

The festival will bring the likes of Kungs (FR), Sam Felt (NL) and Kidnap (GB) to the Mahalaxmi Racecourse between 3–5 November. Palm Tree has also taken place in The Hamptons (US), Cabo San Lucas (MX) and Pag Island (HR).

Elsewhere in the festival market, pre-existing brands have hailed new milestones. India’s biggest metal festival Bangalore Open Air sold out for the first time in its 10-year history.

The 3,000-capacity event, which is produced in partnership with Germany’s marquee metal festival Wacken Open Air, saw acts including Mayhem, Pestilence, Kryptos, Godless, Born of Osiris, Dying Embrace and Amorphia perform at Royal Orchid Resorts at Yelahanka.

Closing out the year, Percept Live’s Sunburn festival will return to Goa in December, with international artists such as Alesso (SE), Charlotte De Witte (BE) and Timmy Trumpet (AU).

“India’s music landscape has witnessed meteoric growth in the past few years,” says Kunal Khambhat, head of live events & IP at BookMyShow, said in the most recent Global Promoters Report.

“Slowly but steadily, the country has set the stage to become a keystone for some of the biggest music performances and markets in the world – from hosting acclaimed international and Indian independent artists at large concerts to smaller formats that are gradually shaping the music landscape in the country.”

 


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India live industry reports post-pandemic surge

India is enjoying a post-pandemic boom for live music, with ticket sales already approaching last year’s total within the first six months of 2023, according to BookMyShow.

The promoting and ticketing giant’s end-of-year report for 2022 showed that eight million fans flocked to the more than 19,000 live entertainment events held in the country, with over 500,000 concert-goers attending gigs by themselves.

And this year is shaping up to be even more successful, thanks to shows such as the debut edition of Lollapalooza India, which drew 60,000 people over two days, Backstreet Boys, who pulled in 25,000 across concerts at the Jio World Gardens, Mumbai and Airia Mall, Gurugram, and Bangalore Open Air, India’s biggest metal festival, which sold out for the first time in its 10-year history.

“The number of music events hosted and number of tickets sold for music shows have already touched 80% of the 2022 music events roster, within less than six months of 2023 on BookMyShow,” Owen Roncon, BookMyShow’s head of live music, tells The Independent.

The debut edition of Lollapalooza India drew 60,000 fans between 28-29 January, with 40 artists performing across four stages at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse Lawns in Mumbai. The event saw performances from local and international artists including Imagine Dragons, The Strokes, AP Dhillon, Cigarettes After Sex, Divine, the F16s, Jackson Wang, Imanbek, Greta Van Fleet, The Wombats and Diplo.

“India’s music landscape has witnessed meteoric growth in the past few years”

Roncon says live music is BookMyShow’s fastest-growing category, contributing to 25% of its revenue, and 15% of total ticket sales post-Covid, while 23% of Lollapalooza India registrations had come to the platform for the first time.

Insiders credit factors such as the “ever-evolving infrastructure for concerts and festivals” for the upward trajectory, including the development of purpose-built music venues like Mumbai’s Jio World Garden and the NSCI Dome, in addition to the enhanced demand generated by streaming.

The country was on a promising upswing just as the pandemic hit, having welcomed U2 to Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium in January 2020, which followed visits by the likes of the Rolling Stones (Brabourne Stadium, Mumbai, 2003), Ed Sheeran (Mahalaxmi Race Course, Mumbai, 2015/Reliance Jio Garden, Mumbai, 2017) and Beyoncé (Antilia, Udaipur, 2018).

Post Malone also made his bow in the country last December, headlining the Zomato Feeding India Concert, which attracted 20,000 fans. Other events include the NH7 Weekender, VH1 Supersonic and Magnetic Fields Festival.

“India’s music landscape has witnessed meteoric growth in the past few years,” Kunal Khambhati, head of live events & IP at BookMyShow, told IQ earlier this year. “Slowly but steadily, the country has set the stage to become a keystone for some of the biggest music performances and markets in the world – from hosting acclaimed international and Indian independent artists at large concerts to smaller formats that are gradually shaping the music landscape in the country.

 


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‘India’s music landscape has seen meteoric growth’

India is fast becoming a global entertainment hub, according to some of the world’s leading executives.

Just as the pandemic hit, the country was on a promising upswing in its patchy live music history, having welcomed U2 to Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium in January 2020. The show was the latest in an intermittent stream of superstar visits to Indian soil – The Stones, Sheeran, and Beyoncé have all been down, though Bieber cancelled in October – and was a collaboration between Live Nation and local ticketing giant BookMyShow, which is increasingly positioning itself as India’s foremost international promoter.

In January, the two promoters teamed up on the first Indian Lollapalooza at Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse, featuring Imagine Dragons, The Strokes, and Diplo alongside Indian-born rapper AP Dhillon, Delhi-based singer-songwriter Prateek Kuhad and others. The event drew 60,000 fans over two days, with 40 artists performing across four stages on a 50-acre site.

James Craven, Live Nation president, Middle East, says Lollapalooza coming to Mumbai is a great example of the market’s growing importance.

“It’s really exciting to see global markets open up to music and artists from the Indian sub-continent, as well as seeing how the Indian market continues to open up for international acts,” says Craven in the IQ’s Global Promoters Report. “Expanding global touring routes for artists is key to their growth and that of the industry, and India will play a key role in that going forwards.”

“Expanding global touring routes for artists is key to their growth and that of the industry, and India will play a key role in that”

Kunal Khambhati, head of live events & IP at BookMyShow, says the entertainment and ticketing platform has worked hard to break down barriers to live shows, which included a 28% goods and services tax that now stands at 18%.

“India’s music landscape has witnessed meteoric growth in the past few years,” says Khambhati. “Slowly but steadily, the country has set the stage to become a keystone for some of the biggest music performances and markets in the world – from hosting acclaimed international and Indian independent artists at large concerts to smaller formats that are gradually shaping the music landscape in the country.

“BookMyShow’s work in this space has focused on creating exposure for both global talent to the Indian audience and Indian artists on the global stage,” he adds. “Lollapalooza is a global music phenomenon, an incomparable international experience, that will not only amplify this exposure in India but in all of Asia and put the spotlight on the country as a global entertainment hub.”

Elsewhere in the festival market, India’s biggest metal festival Bangalore Open Air sold out for the first time in its 10-year history.

“This will go down in the history books,” said Bangalore Open Air founder, Salman U Syed. “A heavy metal festival in Bangalore, India, is sold out. Thank you for your support. Ten years of hard work determination and patience.”

“The country has set the stage to become a keystone for some of the biggest music performances and markets in the world”

The 3,000-capacity event, which is produced in partnership with Germany’s marquee metal festival Wacken Open Air, will this year celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Mayhem, Pestilence, Kryptos, Godless, Born of Osiris, Dying Embrace and Amorphia will lead the celebrations at the 1 April event at Royal Orchid Resorts at Yelahanka.

It’s not just domestic executives that are touting India’s rapid growth. The likes of Wasserman Music’s Alex Hardee and ATC Live’s Alex Bruford testified to the market’s upward trajectory at the most recent International Live Music Conference (ILMC).

“I was just in India, where Lumineers headlined the NH7 Weekender and it was incredible,” said Bruford. “More than 20,000 people drove for about eight hours to get to the show – all completely local fans – and it was one of the band’s favourite gigs they’ve ever played.”

Hardee told ILMC delegates how Alan Walker (represented by Lee Anderson and Tom Schroeder at Wasserman) recently broke new ground in India: “He did ten shows in ten cities…I don’t think an international act has ever done that.”

“More than 20,000 people drove for about eight hours to get to the show”

While streaming rates point to a large pop market, challenging routing and a lack of infrastructure have hampered the development of an Indian circuit for rock and pop shows. Venues for shows typically have to be built from scratch on outdoor sites, and purpose-built venues are only a long-term prospect.

The EDM market is already creating circuits of its own. Percept Live’s three-day, 30,000-per-day Sunburn Festival in Goa returned in December, having brought many of the world’s top DJs down since 2007, and Percept has expanded into increasingly ambitious tours – including a six-city trek for DJ Snake in November, visiting Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore but also less-travelled spots such as Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.

“This is the first time we have done a six-city tour over two weekends with such a big artist,” says Percept Live COO Karan Singh, noting that DJ Snake drew anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 per city. “If you have eight or ten markets where the top international acts can play, that’s good for the industry overall.”

Other experienced electronic promoters include Mixtape Live, Submerge, and Mumbai’s Krunk Live, whose travelling Bass Camp Festival celebrated its tenth year in November. Another major player in the Indian business is payments provider Paytm, which bought OML’s ticketing arm Insider in 2017.

As well as presenting tours by artists such as Singh and Dosanjh, Paytm Insider is behind the Bacardi NH7 Weekender, which has featured Basement Jaxx, A.R. Rahman, and Megadeth and brought The Lumineers, Dirty Loops and J.I.D. back to its home city of Pune for its 11th edition in November.

 


This article contains excerpts from the Global Promoters Report, a first-of-its-kind resource that highlights the world’s leading promoters and the 40 top markets they operate in. The report is now available to subscribers of IQ.

Lollapalooza India to debut in 2023

Lollapalooza has announced it is expanding to India, with the inaugural edition set for Mumbai from 28-29 January 2023.

Lollapalooza India will showcase both global stars and local talent and will mark the first time the event has been held in Asia.

Offering two days of music across four stages as well as culinary selections, art and fashion, line-up and ticket information will be released soon.

“The music of India is transcendental, it draws our spirits East,” says Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell. “Lollapalooza is an instrument for unity, peace, and education utilising the universal languages of music and art to find common ground.”

Lollapalooza India is being produced by Farrell, WME, C3 Presents and India’s BookMyShow, and means the brand has now grown to eight countries on four continents, including editions in the US, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France and Sweden.

“We are excited to introduce fans to an entirely new festival experience”

“Lollapalooza has always been about exploring boundaries, musically and geographically,” says C3 Presents partner Charlie Walker. “We are excited to introduce fans to an entirely new festival experience that has been a significant rite of passage for millions of music fans around the world for more than three decades.”

BookMyShow is owned and operated by Big Tree Entertainment and is described as “India’s leading entertainment destination”. The company has brought international stars such as U2, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Justin Bieber to the market over the past few years.

“BookMyShow is proud to bring Lollapalooza to India – making it the eighth country and the fourth continent to do so,” says the firm’s founder and CEO Ashish Hemrajani. “With a mix of some stellar Indian talent and global artists coming together on the same stage, we expect nothing short of magic.”

Launched in 2007, BookMyShow has evolved from an online ticketing platform for movies to end-to-end management of live entertainment events including concerts, theatrical productions and sport.

 


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BookMyShow lays off 200 as restrictions continue

Indian ticketing giant BookMyShow has laid off another 200 employees as coronavirus restrictions continue to hurt demand for live entertainment and cinema.

BookMyShow, headquartered in Mumbai (Bombay), is India’s biggest online ticket seller, shifting as much as 50% of the movie-mad country’s cinema tickets and ticketing many of its major live music events. It also operates as a co-promoter for international concerts, such as U2’s historic Mumbai show in December 2019, one of the last before the pandemic hit.

New initiatives such as the launch of livestreaming solution BookMyShow Online in mid-2020 haven’t been enough to avoid further redundancies, following an initial round of 270 lay-offs last May, according to CEO Ashish Hemrajani, who announced the redundancies on Twitter.

Hemrajani tweets that BookMyShow has been forced to let go of “200 of the most incredibly talented and performance-driven individuals” who had been been “handpicked and curated over years”, and that announcing the lay-offs was the “right thing” to do to enable them to find new jobs quickly.

“I’m sure we will all come out of this stronger”

He has asked other companies who have openings for the staff to send him a message on Twitter or email [email protected] with information.

“I had two thoughts: one of managing optics, or two just doing the right thing,” Hemrajani explains. “And for me, finding each of them a new home, where a new journey can begin, was the easy choice. So if you have leads, please DM me and we will do the needful.

“They will contribute incredibly to the growth of your wonderful firms. I’m sure we will all come out stronger.”

At press time, India had around 60,000 daily cases of Covid-19. While heavy restrictions remain in many areas, some states, such as West Bengal and the Punjab, are again opening up, with restaurants, bars and cinemas allowed to operate at 50% capacity.

 


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India: State of Hindipendents

If there were an award for the greatest potential touring market, India would be on that stage, brandishing the trophy, year in, year out. With a population nudging 1.4 billion and projected to surpass that of China by 2022, India is about as vast as countries get. Nonetheless, when a big band comes to town, the comparative rarity of the event still makes global headlines.

U2’s show in December at Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium, the very last stop on the fifth leg of The Joshua Tree Tour, wasn’t the first superstar show to come to India – far from it: The Stones played Mumbai and Bangalore in 2003, while Beyoncé and Shakira came in 2007, Metallica in 2011, Coldplay in 2016, and Ed Sheeran in 2015 and 2017, with other significant visitors in between.

But each major concert fires up the expectation that India’s biggest cities could soon become routine destinations for the world’s biggest artists. And U2’s show before a crowd of 42,590, staged by local ticketing giant BookMyShow in partnership with Live Nation, got the country dreaming once more.

“There were a lot of reservations from everybody coming into India,” says BookMyShow CEO and founder Ashish Hemrajani, who freely concedes that India has failed to meet international expectations for live shows in the past. “It was the first outing for U2 here; it was the first show of this scale and magnitude; it was the last show of the tour. There was a lot riding on it and everyone was on tenterhooks.”

BookMyShow has been scaling up its promoting exploits in recent years, bringing Cirque du Soleil, NBA pre-season games, an adapted Hindi Aladdin and the Coldplay-headlined Mumbai edition of the Global Citizen festival, but Hemrajani says U2 represented a new level and a new set of pressures.

“There were a lot of reservations from everybody coming into India”

“We have got a great team in India, but nothing prepares you for dealing with Arthur Fogel, with Jake Berry and the whole team,” he says. “But if you talk to the folks that we dealt with, they were very pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism they found.”

More than anyone else in the Indian business, Hemrajani has both a vision and a platform to bring about a revolution in the nation’s live entertainment offering. BookMyShow sells between 35% and 50% of all cinema tickets in a cinema-mad nation (“we are a hot, dusty country, which is an assault on all your senses, and cinema is the cheapest, most comfortable form of indoor entertainment,” he explains), and played a part in the massive success of the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket. If Hemrajani judges that India is ripe for some concert-going, the chances are he knows what he is talking about.

The same feeling has recently been in the air across the country. The preceding month, also at DY Patil Stadium, Katy Perry and Dua Lipa inaugurated the OnePlus Music Festival, along with local acts Amit Trivedi, Ritviz, as we keep searching and The Local Train. Both of the top-billers were new to the market, and again, the show was an unconventional labour of love, this time organised by the local operation of Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus, which rivals Samsung and Apple in India.

As OnePlus India general manager Vikas Agarwal told India’s The Telegraph newspaper: “[We were] not looking to organise everything by ourselves, but the country [was] not yet ready to organise such a large-scale event. [So] starting from the artist selection to the whole conceptualisation of the event, logistics – everything was done for the first time by the brand. I hope more such events will be organised in India.”

And then, of course, came Covid-19, to which we will inevitably return in a minute.

“The folks that we dealt with were very pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism they found”

Still a mostly rural nation of numerous languages and cultures, heavily regionalised laws and huge inequality, India has always had more pressing priorities than slotting conveniently into a Western live music model. All the same, its entertainment market is highly evolved. The homegrown cinema industry enjoys a sophisticated, mostly mobile ticketing infrastructure, spearheaded by BookMyShow, with strong competition lately from Alibaba-backed Paytm. Both have diverse businesses and are busy across many sectors, including cricket, theatre, food and mobile payments.

Online ticketing was reckoned to be worth $330 million in 2017, according to Indian management consultant RedSeer, whose prediction of $580m in revenues this year has sadly been scuppered by recent events. In the past, the lion’s share of online ticket sales (55%), was for movies, with sport on 25% and events taking the remaining 20%, though both the latter categories are growing.

EDM, in particular, has found a booming home in India, where there is a large network of clubs and established festivals, from OML’s multi-city Bacardi NH7 Weekender to the monster Sunburn in Pune.

“The electronic music scene in the country has developed into its own industry and it’s spread to wider parts of the country,” says Dev Bhatia of dance music management and booking agency UnMute. “Having said that, I still feel we’re barely scratching the surface. Considering India will [soon] have five to six hundred million people under the age of 35 with cell phones and accessibility, the potential is endless.”

That potential is currently on pause. At the time of writing, India was attempting to relax its notably strict lockdown conditions even as it faced a record spike in Covid-19 infections. In a country where many millions of informal  workers live on a daily wage, the economy can’t stand idle for long.

 


Continue reading this feature in the digital edition of IQ 90, or subscribe to the magazine here

India’s BookMyShow launches livestreaming platform

BookMyShow, India’s largest online ticketing company, today (1 July) launched a pay-per-view streaming platform for live events.

BookMyShow Online will showcase performances across music, comedy and the performing arts and will be accessible via the BookMyShow app and website. A subscription-based model will also be rolled out in the next few months.

One of the first events to appear on the platform will make its debut is Sunburn Home Festival, the virtual edition of Goan EDM festival Sunburn, which is taking place on 11 and 12 July with sets from Bassjackers, Vini Vici, Mattn and Ummet Ozcan.

Tickets cost Rs99 (€1.20) for one day or Rs199 (€2.40) for both days.

Other upcoming events include shows by Bang Bang Romeo and Electric Enemy, and theatre workshops with veterans like Puneet Issar, Rohini Hattangadi, Rakesh Bedi, and Anant Mahadevan.

During lockdown, BookMyShow has facilitated the discovery of online entertainment on its platform, with currently almost half a million viewers accessing virtual events via its service per week.

With BookMyShow Online, the company intends to put all events behind a paywall, with prices varying per shows and platinum options, including post-performance Q&As, available for a greater price.

“Our latest video streaming platform BookMyShow Online was born out of this need to make virtual live entertainment a frictionless and hassle-free viewing experience”

“Sensing the shift in our users’ appetite for entertainment during this lockdown, we were agile enough to change tack by introducing virtual in-home entertainment offerings in India and other global markets,” says Parikshit Dar, co-founder and director of BookMyShow.

“Our latest video streaming platform BookMyShow Online was born out of this need to make virtual live entertainment a frictionless and hassle-free viewing experience.”

The streaming platform will initially be able to host over 50,000 concurrent viewers per minute, with the company reportedly testing a feature to take this up to 100,000.

“The platform is built for scale,” says Dar. “This tech allows us the ability to spin multiple live events with our livestreaming capability, enhance the user experience, and provide a lightning-fast video player for streaming content.”

The company has partnered with global video technology platform Brightcove to power BookMyShow Online.

In May, BookMyShow announced cost-cutting measures including the lay-off or furloughing of 270 employees and company-wide salary reductions.

Read the Indian market report in the latest edition of IQ Magazine here.

Photo: Preeti Photography/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) (cropped)


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India sees live events boom in 2019

The number of tickets sold for live events in India increased significantly in 2019, according to new data from ticketing platform BookMyShow.

The number of events listed on BookMyShow – valued at US$1 billion and “easily the dominant force in Indian ticketing”, according to the International Ticketing Yearbook 2019 – jumped 23% last year, to more than 17,500, with concerts the second-biggest attraction after ever-popular cricket.

Live events “wholly executed by” (ie sold only via) BookMyShow, meanwhile, increased 156% in 2019, reports India’s Moneycontrol.

Among the most popular live events were Sunburn festival U2’s first Indian show

Among the most popular live music events in India, a market of some 1.4bn people, last year were the 2019 edition of the Sunburn EDM festival in Goa, which was attended by 300,000 fans, and U2’s first-ever Indian show – of which more than a quarter of those who attended were first-time attendees to a live event in Mumbai (Bombay).

Elsewhere, the CEO of BookMyShow’s chief rival, Alibaba-backed Paytm, Shreyas Srinivasan, says it sold more than 7.5 million tickets in 2019, with a 25% increase in the number of events ticketed.

While live events contribute an estimated 50% of India’s online ticketing revenues, it remains films which are doing the biggest business: Avengers: Endgame was BookMyShow’s biggest event of 2019, according to the Eastern Mirror, with 8.6 million tickets sold.

 


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Major moves: consolidation sweeps the ticketing sector

The past 12 months have seen big-money deals by global firms who have been expanding their reach through buying up existing companies.

Eventim’s major expansion into the €800 million French live music market will see it establish a joint venture with the retailer by the end of 2019. Under the proposed new structure, Eventim would acquire 48% of France Billet, with an option to increase its holding to a majority stake over the next four years. It is folding its Eventim French business into the partnership, and the established brands – which in addition to Francebillet.com include Fnacspectacles.com and Billetreduc.com – will remain in operation.

This move will be a blow for Paris-headquartered multimedia conglomeration Vivendi, which owns the local company Digitick and was the third-largest competitor behind France Billet and Ticketmaster.

Leapfrogging its rivals, Eventim has secured the top position in the ticketing space. However, it currently does not have a promoter presence in France, unlike Live Nation or Vivendi, the latter of which owns the venues L’Olympia (1,996-cap.) and Theâtre de L’Œuvre (326-cap.) in Paris, as well as Olympia Production, the operator of a number of French festivals including Les Déferlantes (12,000-cap.) and Garorock (45,000-cap.).

In 2017-18, Eventim bought three significant promoters in Italy – Vertigo, Friends and Partners, and D’Alessandro e Galli (Di and Gi) – solidifying its brand TicketOne as the dominant ticketer in the country after Ticketmaster opened operations there in 2017.

On the other side of the world, Live Nation Entertainment’s (LNE) $480m decision to buy a 51% stake in Ocesa Entertainment, the largest promoter in Latin America, and owner of Ticketmaster Mexico, is noteworthy.

Promoting about 3,100 shows a year, Ocesa reportedly sold 3.8m tickets in 2018. Ticketmaster Mexico is comfortably the country’s biggest ticket seller, with around 37m tickets sold each year.

While LNE and Ocesa have had a long partnership, this move significantly enhances the global entertainment company’s footprint

While LNE and Ocesa have had a long partnership through touring, festivals and the Ticketmaster brand, this move significantly enhances the global entertainment company’s footprint.

It demonstrates LNE’s growing confidence in the Latin American market and will likely lead to an increasing number of tours by international talent to the continent, and potentially further acquisitions of promoters, ticketing companies or venues.

What impact it will have on Ticketmaster in the US, where the second language is Spanish, remains to be seen. The Spanish- language market in the US is arguably currently underserved, and this could be seen as an internal growth opportunity for the global behemoth.

But more importantly, this could be part of a wider move by LNE into Latin America, where the firm historically has no major presence. Last year it acquired one of Argentina’s top promoters, DF Entertainment, while earlier in 2018, it took a stake in one of the largest music festivals in the world, Rock in Rio (100,000-cap), recently increasing its holding to 60%, which could be a sign that Ticketmaster is preparing to make a move into Brazil. Does this indicate a strategy of expansion across the region? We’ll have to wait and see.

LNE-owned Ticketmaster also bought Australia and New Zealand’s most significant independent ticketing company, Moshtix, in February, further expanding its presence in a market where it competes fiercely with TEG’s Ticketek.

Although it’s not likely to shift the balance of power, Ticketmaster’s move will add another indie brand to its suite of ticketing platforms.

Meanwhile, TEG grew its Asian reach by buying the Philippines-based ticketing company TicketWorld. This adds to its existing interests in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Macau. As well as major international tours by the likes of Guns N’ Roses and Katy Perry, TicketWorld has a strong presence in the local theatre market, and provides ticket services to Philippines’ venues including Solaire Resort and Casino, Resorts World Manila, BGC Arts Center and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

What we can say is that the last 12 months have seen no sign of the trend for consolidation slowing down – and it may just be hotting up even further

“We see great opportunities in many Asian markets and our strategy puts us on course to becoming a truly pan-Asian promoter,” said TEG CEO Geoff Jones at the time.

While not strictly new acquisitions, DEAG continued its policy of wholly owning companies by completing the purchase of the MyTicket platform, which going forward will be powered by the Secutix SaaS solution, while Eventim completed its takeover of German online movie ticketing platform Kinoheld and Scandinavian ticketing solution Venuepoint.

So what’s next? In the fast-moving world of ticketing, it’s hard to say.

India’s BookMyShow sells some 20m tickets a month, mainly in the cinema sector, but is looking to grow further into live entertainment. In 2018, COO of non-films at BookMyShow Albert Almeida told the Economic Times the firm wants to increase its revenues from non-cinema events from 30% to 50% by 2020.

It is one of the ticketing partners at the newly opened Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai and is addressing a lack of infrastructure in its home country by building its touring venues and producing its own shows. At a recent fundraising round, the company was valued at $1 billion, and there is still huge potential in the country of 1.3bn people. But maybe it will look to acquire in new markets, or further consolidate its position in the Middle East.

Another interesting area is the growing trend of Chinese companies taking an interest in Western music companies (for example, Tencent acquired a 10% stake in Universal Music, with an option to take another 10% in a year). Could we see a Chinese firm take an interest in a ticketing company outside of its homeland?

What we can say is that the last 12 months have seen no sign of the trend for consolidation slowing down – and it may just be hotting up even further.

For more insight into the state of the global ticketing industry, read IQ’s International Ticketing Yearbook 2019.


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