LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — Former Ticketmaster Chief Executive Fredric D. Rosen has been hired by Canadian ticketing company Outbox Technology as they move into the U.S. market under the aegis of a new subsidiary, Outbox Enterprises LLC. Rosen will serve as the CEO of the new venture, which is a partnership with Cirque du Soleil Inc., which Outbox has provided ticketing services to for a number of years.
Unlike Ticketmaster/Live Nation, which aggregates tickets to thousands of events on a single site, Outbox will provide 'white label' services to concert venues, festivals and sports franchises to enable them to sell tickets directly through their own branded websites. Outbox lists the Montréal Canadiens, the Bell Centre in Montréal, and the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles among its list of clients.
"The middle-man model is dead," Rosen told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. "You have to evolve."
Rosen served as Ticketmaster's CEO from 1982 to 1998 and played a central role in shaping the company's strategy of acting as a central clearing house for event tickets and the connected fees that have drawn increasing criticism from some of the company's customers.
According to the WSJ, the fees are not something that Rosen plans to jettison from Outbox's plan however. Rosen said that he plans to let Outbox clients set their own service fees, a percentage of which would flow to Outbox.
"People haven't done a good job of explaining what that service charge is," Rosen told the WSJ. "You can't provide a service without having some ability to make money."
After leaving Ticketmaster, Rosen also joined another 'white label' ticketing company, Audienceview, as their CEO, but left the company after just a year for reasons unexplained, Ticket News reported.
The five-year-old Outbox was originally founded by Jean-Françoys Brousseau in partnership with Cirque du Soleil Inc. Brousseau too, is an ex Ticketmaster alum and served as the company's chief technology officer from 2000 to 2005. – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
