Ticketmaster, Facebook Present Interactive Ticket-Buying Experience

In an effort to curb the 40-ish percent of live concert tickets that go unsold, Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard unveiled earlier this week his plan to steer the much-maligned company in a direction more attuned to the music fans: interactive seating charts in cooperation with Facebook.

As reported by Fast Company, Ticketmaster will partner up with Facebook and expand the role of the concert ticket. Hubbard wants ticket-buying to be about more than just admission to a show: With connectivity via Facebook, customers will be directed to a map of the venue’s seating chart when purchasing tickets, which will allow them to see their other Facebook friends who are attending. Once a customer purchases a ticket, he or she will additionally have the option to share their own seat with the Facebook world.

One goal, of course, is to allow friends to purchase seats next to one another—ticket-buyers can even tag up to four friends upon completing their purchases. The bigger, more ambitious goal is to connect fans of a specific band with other fans they may not have had the chance to meet otherwise. The rationale is that by publicizing their seat locations, fans will have the opportunity to connect and bond prior to the concert.

Hubbard also desires to keep the seating charts for shows available to the public after the event so people who hesitated to share their seating information before an event will have the opportunity to connect afterwards with concertgoers they met at the show.

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