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Robbie Williams partners with Ticketmaster and Shazam on interactive ticket

By | Published on Wednesday 14 December 2016

Robbie Williams

Having spectacularly and unapologetically shunned Ticketmaster and everything it stands for – by getting right into bed with Amazon’s new ticketing service, which has exclusive rights to tickets for his intimate show at St John At Hackney Church tonight – Robbie Williams has now bed-hopped right back into the arms of Live Nation’s ticketing powerhouse. And all it took was a little interactivity. Simple.

This may not have been the exact sequence of events, but Williams is definitely partnering with Ticketmaster on “the world’s first interactive ticket”. Which is a bold claim. I mean, just holding a ticket in your hand is quite interactive. But basically, Ticketmaster has taken the Collector Ticket product it has developed – a credit-card sized ticket on a lanyard that fans can, well, collect – and has thrown in a bit of Shazam integration so that fans can also unlock some digital content by scanning the same credit-card sized ticket with their phone.

“Ticketmaster is partnering with Shazam, one of the world’s most popular apps, to develop a truly immersive and interactive Collector Ticket”, says the ticketing firm. And yes, this is basically just a glorified QR code promotion, and yes they did use the “immersive” word in that quote there, but I’ve been banging on about artists selling exclusive digital content to fans at concerts for years now, so hey, well done on doing just that.

“Robbie Williams is one of the UK’s most successful and innovative performing artists”, says Ticketmaster’s VP Artist Services Sam Isles. “His 2017 ‘Heavy Entertainment Show’ tour promises to be his most inventive yet, and the interactive Collector Ticket is a perfect addition to that. It represents a great way for fans to get closer to the artist and enjoy owning a concert ticket like never before”.

Snapchat has helped make QR codes a thing again, of course. And look, elsewhere in Shazam news, it’s just announced a tie-up with Snapchat. “This partnership will make it possible for users to Shazam from within Snapchat by pressing and holding on the Snapchat camera screen when music is playing nearby”, says the official announcement. Confirming “to Shazam” is now a verb. Thanks for that.



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