Amazon looks to expand online ticket business
It’s increasingly becoming Amazon and company CEO Jeff Bezos’ world, and we are just spending in it.
The No. 2 richest man in the USA, Bezos owns The Washington
Post and is building spaceships. The online retailer he founded in 1994 has grown beyond book sales to groceries, electronics, clothing and more, and Amazon streams video, makes movies and provides cloud computing services ... and may be looking to build its own live sports network.
Someday the company may even sell tickets to those events it broadcasts if its reach continues to expand. Several recent job postings — first noted by tech news site Recode — suggest Amazon is looking to grow its Amazon Tickets business beyond the U.K., where it started last year, to the USA and elsewhere in Europe.
For now, the enterprise focuses on music and entertainment. “Amazon Tickets is a start-up business with a vision of becom- ing Earth’s most customer-centric ticketing company, a place where event-goers can come to find and discover any ticket they might want to buy online,” ac- cording to a description of the initiative in a job listing posted this month for an Amazon Tickets, Music principal business development manager.
Amazon’s U.K. tickets business offers tickets for music, theater, and comedy. “As we grow our team to support our rapid expansion, we are looking for talented individuals to join us in delighting customers and having some fun along the way,” the job listing reads.
Other Amazon Tickets jobs posted include software engineers and entertainment busi- ness developers. “The purpose of the role is to help the Tickets team grow its business relationships in the entertainment industry to expand tickets selection across existing and new categories and territories by working with ticket rights-holders to reach agreements on distribution for sale to end customers,” reads the listing for a music business development manager.
How challenging will an Amazon liftoff be in a marketplace that has an entrenched giant such as Live Nation Ticketmaster? Maybe Alexa knows.