Massive layoffs at Ticketmaster | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 One other thing I saw that I wanted to look at. Oh yeah, since we're talking about Ticketmaster. Apparently Ticketmaster ploy. We talked about Ticketmaster a lot on the show. This is from Digital Music News dot com. Major cuts at Ticketmaster. The company has cut three hundred and fifty jobs, as Live Nation divestor dangles. Let's see what this is about. It says here Ticketmaster cut eight percent of its global staff. Are around three hundred fifty employees in its on go, in its engineering, product and design divisions.

0:33 The company also cut contractors. By the way, I wonder if some of this is the result of AI, you know, just aibby being able to do certain tasks that you don't necessarily need humans to do, and a company like Ticketmaster, because any company that I mean, I don't know if you would use the term tech company to describe Ticketmaster. Necessarily it's a you know, ticketing platform, but it's a ticketing platform on the Internet. They do depend heavily on probably a lot of things, a lot of tasks that you can train AI models to do.

1:09 Again, this is from Digital Music News. It says Ticketmaster has cut eight percent of its global staff this week. According to a new report from Pollstar. The cut effects approximately three hundred fifty employees across twenty five countries, primarily in its engineering, product and design divisions, as well as reducing its contractors. Notably, the company's executive leadership team has not changed. Samil Meta, Ticketmaster Global President, who joined the company last October, said, quote, the purpose of these cuts is stronger prioritization, especially in engineering, product and design unquote.

1:44 He also said, quote that comes with flattening layers, consolidating ownership, changing how teams are structured, and ensuring that we put more energy behind specific initiatives. We're going to keep investing in specific areas so that we can actually achieve the vision we laid out unquote. Meta presented his vision for Ticketmaster's future on April fifteen during a keynote address at the Pollstar Live conference. There, he explained the importance of Ticketmaster meeting fans where they are and optimizing the checkout process via new technologies like AI and there it is, There it is, he said during his presentation.

2:26 Quote what I learned over the last ten years, which I'm trying to apply to Ticketmaster, is how to engage with commerce at scale, how to move billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions all over the world between buyers and sellers, how to fight bad actors, fraud, and most importantly, how to take a technology first approach to problem solving, especially in the age of AI. Unquote. Meta was formerly the chief product Officer and head of Business org at Square, whose holdings include the likes of Title, Cash, app after pay, bit Key, and Spiral.

3:01 So as you can see from his background, you know this is a guy who's thinking about this stuff, right, he said, quote to me, the strong performance reflects the past, and this is about what we are doing to set ourselves up for the earnings report twelve months from now, eighteen months from now, twenty four months from now. I'm thinking. The thinking is, let's do this so we are well positioned for two years down the road, one year down the road, or eighteen months down the road. So there you go. There you have it.