Ticketmaster Loses No. 2 Customer SMG to Live Nation

Live Nation (LYV) is taking on Ticketmaster (TKTM) in the music ticketing market, and it is off to a rousing start.

This morning, Live Nation announced an exclusive deal to sell tickets for music event company SMG, a subsidiary of the publicly-traded investment fund American Capital (ACAS). According to the announcement from the two companies, SMG is “the world’s leading venue management company.”

The company will launch its Live Nation Ticketing service in January 2009; Live Nation said the SMG deal will ramp up to an estimated five million tickets a year by 2011. Live Nation expects to sell more than 10 million tickets a year from the new ticketing service just from its own venues.

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