Webware

Music giant Live Nation announced on Thursday that it has partnered with SMG, the operator of 216 stadiums, arenas, convention centers, and concert halls, in an agreement that lasts through 2011.

The announcement is in anticipation of Live Nation's ticketing service, which launches in January and will sell tickets for venues that Live Nation already represents as a promoter as well as third-party partners. Under the terms of the agreement, Live Nation will be the exclusive outlet for SMG's tickets; Live Nation expects the SMG deal to raise its potential ticketing volume by 25 percent.

Live Nation recently ended its ticketing contract with Ticketmaster, owned by InterActiveCorp before CEO Barry Diller spun it off into a separate company. When Live Nation Ticketing launches, the two companies will be direct competitors.

Live Nation has also started offering "360" representation for artists, taking the place of a music label and touring manager, as well as a promoter.

Fandango, the movie-ticketing company owned by Comcast since 2007, announced on Monday that it has acquired Movies.com, a movie news and reviews aggregator. Movies.com had previously been owned by Disney's Walt Disney Internet Group.

Financial details were not disclosed.

The aim of the acquisition is to provide a one-stop movie hub for the Web, executives said.

"We are pleased to expand our rich-entertainment reach through this strategic addition of Movies.com," Chuck Davis, CEO of Fandango, said in a statement. The ticketing site currently sells admission to 15,000 theaters in the United States. "We'll be able to leverage our combined assets to offer millions of new moviegoers the best movie-related information available on the Web."

SeatQuest lets you zoom in on available seats in your price range.

(Credit: SeatQuest)

Chicago-based start-up SeatQuest is offering a way to search online for seats for games, concerts, plays, and other performances.

The site offers up a search box for venue, event or ZIP code. The full public launch is set for November 27, which might explain why not all of the venues offered for San Francisco had tickets listed for sale and some venues were missing for the Bay Area. For instance, searching for musical group "Iron and Wine" shows venues in San Diego, Portland, and Dallas, but not Oakland, Calif., where they are playing at the Paramount later this month.

The interface is pretty straightforward. After you type in a request and select an option, it loads a map of the available seats for that venue. You can input the number of seats you want, and offer a maximum price you want to pay and it will mark the seats on the venue map that fit your criteria. Clicking on a seat displays information about the exact location and price in a pop-up window. It's fairly easy to navigate a magnifying glass over the seats and rows to see more specifically the location and arrangement of the seats.

You can click on a button to buy tickets from various ticket selling agencies.

The application also will be available in Facebook, where people can use it to see where friends are seated at shows.

Urban events site Going.com, which targets party-friendly 20-somethings with a hipster slant, announced earlier this week that it has expanded into local event ticketing. This means that promoters and event hosts on Going can now sell tickets for their concerts, benefits, parties, and other social get-togethers through the site.

The structure is much like a standard ticket site's "will-call" option; no paper tickets are mailed. "You go to the venue or the place of the event," Going CEO Evan Schumacher explained in an interview with CNET News.com, "and we tell (you) to bring your credit card or ID."

Just like the rest of Going.com, the new ticketing service is limited to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. And Schumacher assured me that it won't be a free-for-all due to security concerns.

"The first thing (promoters) do is they have to go through a registration process, which includes a credit card transaction validating that they are who they are, and that they represent the organization they say they represent," he said. He estimated that this approval process should take a day or two. "We actually reach out to the venue or the organization that they say they're selling tickets either for or at, and make sure that this is an accurate representation as well."

In other words, it'd be difficult for you to use Going to monetize your next house party.

And, he added, ticket resellers will not be able to use Going to scalp tickets purchased from, say, Ticketmaster at inflated prices. "We don't get involved with tickets that are at major venues," he explained. "It's not a marketplace like an eBay."

Going has cited Pollstar Magazine figures that put the U.S. ticket sales market at $3.6 billion and rising. That revenue potential is why a relatively niche-based events site is willing to take this kind of risk.

"Every ticketing site has to deal with fraud prevention," he said. "People will try all kinds of things, I'm sure, and that's why we're focusing on a high-touch validation at this phase."

If you're an event planner, there's a new Web service called Eventsbot that's set up to help you with some of the logistics of promoting, and selling tickets online. If you're familiar with EventBrite, Eventsbot isn't too far off: just set up your event, set ticket prices, promote it, and Eventsbot takes a small cut of the sales as its fee. The service is aimed mainly at event planners, but if you're looking to host a small event with controlled price ticketing, services like this can be a little more extensive than basic party invite sites, or build-your-own ticket sellers like Zaptix or TS.com.

Eventsbot comes in two flavors, a standard and premium. The standard is free, although you're not getting some of the more advanced features like event page customization, invoices and payments via PayPal, and integration of the invite page into your site's domain. Signing up for the premium service doesn't require a monthly fee or any contracts, instead the service charges a 2 percent fee on every ticket sold.

If there's anything to be said about improving the service, I found many of the hosted events didn't look very good. This can be remedied by "skinning" them with your site's CSS, but in terms of page layout and readability, I'm more impressed with EventBrite's offerings, as they're slightly easier on the eyes. Considering these pages are a front end for people to pay money and decide whether or not they're coming, first impressions can make a big difference.

Other event planning services include the aforementioned EventBrite, 123 Signup, Acteva, and RegOnline.

This invite isn't much to look at, but if you're an Eventsbot premium member, you can skin an event with your site's CSS.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Farecast, an airline ticket prediction and purchasing service, has launched a new Deals section that helps people find the best prices on tickets within a 90-day window. Unlike the recently launched Fare Guard, the Deals section is completely free and competes with other discount travel sites like TravelZoo and CheapTickets to aggregate flights that sell for a fraction of their typical cost. The service is currently limited to 38 major airports in the United States.

The search results are separated by the best deals, last-minute flights, weekend and weeklong flights, and flights for families. There's also a section for the best deals nationwide to recommend to friends or family members elsewhere. Each deal has an arrow icon that tells you what's happening to the fare's price in the near future, along with a recommendation for or against a purchase.

The defining difference between Farecast Deals and other deals sites is content aggregation. Whereas other sites can get their deals from tipsters and marketers, Farecast actually populates them from its own data. Farecast claims it would take someone "50,000 individual searches" to find the deals they do, and that's just for one city. Give the new service a spin here.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Getting burned on airline ticket-price increases stinks. Today, the ticket-price guesstimating site Farecast (our initial Farecast coverage here) rolled out a new feature called Fare Guard. This $10-per-ticket service lets you lock down the lowest price provided by Farecast for seven days. If the price of the ticket goes up during that time, you can still purchase it at the original, locked price.

In essence Fare Guard is ticket-price travel insurance. Unfortunately, while the service covers any fare increases, it recompenses your expenses after the fact. That means you'll be waiting for a check in the mail from Farecast to make up the price differential. The service promises to have the check out to you within seven days, but it would be nice if it were simply taken off of the original purchase price.

Fare Guard is currently on sale for $3 per ticket until the end of the month.

Forgoing the recently purchased StubHub, there are very few ways to find good Web deals on event tickets without doing some legwork or dealing with cluttered interfaces. Oyaka, which launched last year, draws from several ticket vendors to help you find the best deal on seats. In the same way that Kayak pulls plane tickets, Oyaka grabs all the data, then gives you various tools to sort through it without inundating you with text. You can narrow the results by price, seat location, and number of tickets to quickly find what you're looking for.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Unlike other ticket services such as Coast To Coast Tickets and RazorGator, Oyaka doesn't actually sell you the tickets. Rather it points you to the seller's page so that you can purchase them there.

Oyaka has a few weaknesses. It doesn't pull events outside of the United States (despite having a U.K. and Chinese version of the site), so if you're trying to see whether your favorite band is on a world tour, you'll have to find that information somewhere else. Also, some of the results were out of date, which led to dead ends. More importantly, I found it to be missing some pretty large acts simply due to the fact that they sell their tickets through smaller, third-party services that Oyaka doesn't index.

Oyaka is still a handy tool for finding popular ticket results from a large group of ticket providers. If you're trying to get tickets for a popular event, you're likely to find them with this service. For smaller shows, you're better off visiting the artist's site.