NBA, Ticketmaster Partnering to Create One-Stop Ticketing Website


The NBA announced on Monday that it has partnered with Ticketmaster to create the first sports ticketing website that will list tickets sold by both teams and fans. Fans will now be able to purchase, and sell, tickets to NBA games in one location, and won’t need to scour through secondary ticketing sites like StubHub. The five-year partnership could be a revolutionary advancement in the way sports fans purchase tickets. More details, via Forbes.com: “The NBA’s new Ticketmaster ticketing website, which is expected to launch in October 2012, will allow fans to view all tickets for sale for a given NBA game. This means that fans will be able to compare prices for tickets sold by teams themselves, as well as tickets being re-sold by others on the secondary market. According to Chris Granger, the NBA’s Executive Vice President of Team Marketing and Business Operations, the NBA will be the only major sports league to offer this type of ticketing platform to its fans. ‘This will be revolutionary in its approach. This will be the first time in ticketing history, where the primary ticketing inventory will be presented right next to the secondary inventory,’ Granger said. The NBA has been working on this ticketing platform idea for nearly two years. The league ultimately chose Ticketmaster as the entity to provide the service based upon consideration of several factors. First, Ticketmaster was able to provide the NBA not only with the ability to sell primary and secondary tickets in one location, but also with state-of-the-art access to data and analytics. Ticketmaster’s live analytics software will allow the NBA to adjust the price of its tickets in real-time, depending upon supply and demand factors. Additionally, the NBA believes that Ticketmaster’s analytics software will allow it to determine such things as which fans are most likely to buy season tickets and which fans may not renew their season tickets. ‘We’re going to get a lot smarter about who are fans are and what they want,’ Granger noted.”