Ticketmaster
“Can Ticketmaster leverage its dominant ticketing distribution to own the fan payment and commerce layer across live entertainment globally?”
Founded in 1976, Ticketmaster became the dominant US ticketing platform before merging with Live Nation in 2010 to form a vertically integrated live-entertainment conglomerate. Over the next decade it built a global online ticketing marketplace. From 2021 it experimented with NFT-linked digital collectibles on Polygon and Flow, exploring blockchain as a fan-engagement and anti-scalping tool. The 2023 PayPal/Braintree deal marked a strategic pivot to embed a preferred-payments partner directly into checkout, bundling Pay Later and Venmo alongside fraud protection — signalling Ticketmaster's intent to monetise the checkout layer beyond convenience fees.