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Live Nation Entertainment has followed its subsidiary, Ticketmaster, in launching a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, with the aim of converting more of the 1.3bn people who use the app every month into Live Nation customers.
Bots have increased in popularity in the music business in recent months, with StubHub (for Skype), Universal Music (text message-based) and ticket search engine TickX (for Messenger) among the companies now using so-called conversational commerce to sell tickets.
Live Nation explains how its bot works:
Or, if you can’t imagine it, the gif below shows how to buy tickets with friends:
“Concerts are extremely social experiences, and we’re excited to introduce a concert discovery tool that embodies that social spirit,” says Lisa Licht, Live Nation Concerts’ CMO. “Whether fans choose to interact with our new bot one on one, or get their friends involved in the planning, we think they’ll have a lot of fun finding shows to go to.”
The bot is live now, initially featuring events in North America. To start chatting, users can search for ‘Live Nation Concerts’ in the Messenger app or visit Live Nation Concerts’ Facebook page and click the ‘message’ button.
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Merchants making use of Facebook’s approximately 30,000 chatbots – among them market leaders in airline and movie ticketing – are now able to accept payments through the Messenger-based bots without sending customers to an external site, removing a potential obstacle to concert ticketing companies wishing to get in on the action.
Bots – software programs that use artificial intelligence to interact with users of Facebook’s Messenger app – have already been developed by film ticketing giant Fandango and flight-comparison website Skyscanner, and while StubHub recently created a bot for video-chat service Skype and Ticketmaster’s Ismail Elshareef has said he’d like to develop chatbots for his company, major sellers of tickets for live events have yet to take advantage of the functionality.
Speaking at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in San Francisco yesterday, Facebook’s head of Messenger, Davis Marcus, said supported payment methods will include Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Visa, MasterCard and American Express.
Dave Cotter, the CEO of Seattle tech start-up ReplyYes, which has sold over US$1 million worth of vinyl records using its own chatbots, told IQ in May the technology could also be applied to concert tickets.
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