According to a report in Forbes, the Nederlander Organization, one of Broadway's top theatre owners, will drop Ticketmaster for productions housed in its theatres. The group will replace Ticketmaster with a new, self-formed ticket agency—following in the footsteps of the Shubert Organization, which owns Telecharge, and Ambassador Theatre Group. The development also means Ticketmaster has been all but fully driven away from Broadway, controlling only Disney's New Amsterdam. The company used to handle ticketing for as many as 15 Broadway venues.
The move is the latest ticketing shake-up for Broadway. Jujamcyn, which owns five Broadway theatres, switched its ticketing from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek when live theatre returned post-pandemic in 2021. Now, the company is poised to combine with ATG, which could lead to all Broadway tickets being under the exclusive control of its show's landlords. Shubert theatres have used Shubert-owned Telecharge for decades. ATG is the newest face among Broadway theatre owners, but have controlled ticketing through its ATG Tickets for the company's vast European roster of venues for some time as well.
The Nederlanders reportedly bought digital ticketing company TixTrack in August 2022, a deal that now appears to have been this current move's planning stages. TixTrack appears to have already had deep connections with the live theatre industry. The company lists Nederlander, Nimax, Cirque Du Soleil, Nederlander's BroadwayDirect, ATG Tickets, Blue Man Group, and Jujamcyn among clients for its Nliven platform, a cloud-based enterprise event ticketing system for reserved seating venues.
The Nederlander Organization is the second largest theatre-owning group on Broadway, with nine theatres to the Shubert's 17. Along with Broadway's Gershwin, Lena Horne, Lunt-Fontanne, Marquis, Minskoff, Nederlander, Neil Simon, Palace, and Richard Rodgers Theatres, they own Dolby Theatre and the Hollywood Pantages in Los Angeles; Auditorium Theatre, CIBC Theatre, The Broadway Playhouse, Cadillac Palace Theatre, and the James M. Nederlander Theatre in Chicago; and other venues in Durham, Greensboro, North Charleston, Oklahoma City, San Diego, San Jose, Tucson, Washington, D.C., Anchorage, and London.
