PayPal Lands Live Nation Preferred Payments Partner Deal for Ticket Sales

PayPal has joined forces with Live Nation to become Ticketmaster’s preferred payments partner.

“Our goal is to seamlessly connect artists and event organizers with fans wherever they are in the world, and PayPal helps us take that to the next level with a truly global-reaching payments solution,” Ticketmaster President Mark Yovich said in a Monday (April 3) news release.

“This partnership gives fans continuity and confidence that they have a secure, trusted, and accessible payment method wherever in the world they happen to be attending an event.”

The partnership will let fans buy tickets via PayPal, Venmo and the company’s Pay Later products. It also makes PayPal Braintree Ticketmaster’s primary global payment processor, making checkout faster and giving fans direct access to event add-ons.

“With PayPal’s payment solutions front and center throughout the checkout experience on Ticketmaster, fans can confidently know they are buying tickets with a simple and trusted payment method supported by Purchase Protection and advanced fraud detection technology to help keep their payments safe,” the release said.

The partnership is happening amid more scrutiny on the event ticketing sector following pop star Taylor Swift’s feud with Ticketmaster late last year.

As PYMNTS noted recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing in January called “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” during which Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, “I just want to dispel this notion that this is not a monopoly and then we can go from there about solutions.”

She was referring to Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which control about 70% of ticket sales for major events. The company came under fire for website crashes that kept fans from purchasing tickets to see Swift’s latest tour, leaving more room for disruptors to move into the space.

Meanwhile, recent research by PYMNTS shows that lower-income consumers who make less than $50,000 per year are more likely to pay via debit card and PayPal, according to Digital Economy Payments: The Ascent of Digital Wallets.

According to the study, in the 12 months before December 2022, “high-income consumers also paid with nontraditional payment methods more often, with PayPal making up 8.5% of all their retail purchases, Apple Pay 3.5% and Google Pay 2.1%. Buy now pay later, meanwhile, is more popular among middle-income consumers, who paid for 1.5% of all their retail purchases this way.”