Groupon is widening its reach even further and partnering with Live Nation to bring you GrouponLive, a new site for tickets to venues and events in your area. “Groupon will serve as a local resource for Live Nation events and clients of its global ticketing business, Ticketmaster. The site will be a groundbreaking resource for consumers to find high-value tickets to concerts, sports, theater, arts and other live events, while serving as a timely and effective way for merchants to sell more tickets.”
GrouponLive should hit sometime this summer, and will only be offered to North American subscribers. While the launch will be initially limited, this could be a huge coup for Groupon. The deal-a-day, collective buying site may have been the first and most well-known of its kind, but this niche market is becoming overwhelmingly crowded. Groupon is even experiencing some very tangible, head-to-head competition with LivingSocial–the daily discount site giving it a real run for its money.
Various sites have been branching out with additional coupon platforms, most notably subscriber or invite-only fashion offerings or vacation getaways, but Groupon is the first to tackle live events. And it isn’t going about it with an incremental approach: Ticketmaster is the most popular ticketing provider in the world, and Live Nation fills the show seats of more than 2,000 performing artists worldwide. This kind of a service obviously also opens Groupon up to a whole new set of patrons – patrons who aren’t tempted by some of the more specialty, discount items that the site offers up daily.
Consumers are becoming inundated with the amount of discounts they can get from local vendors via various deal-a-day sites: AT&T just added another to the table with its YellowPages client, and Google Offers and Facebook Deals are staking a claim on this territory. If you want a coupon to just about any retailer in your neighborhood, you can find it. But consistent deals to live events are harder to come by, and GrouponLive could make it a lot easier.
