Punching His Ticket to Success

Michael Chua (’13) is Ticketmaster’s vice president of global business development. He oversees the company’s distribution and product partnerships, and works with the complete gamut of potential partners — from tech and social media platforms to streaming services to the full range of marketplaces and travel-related booking companies — to steward discovery of Ticketmaster events and drive commerce off-platform. Ticketmaster’s clients are venues, teams, artists and promoters who use the company’s services to manage and distribute tickets for their events.

“I work with our partners to create product experiences that will surface those events intelligently to their users,” Chua says before offering a few examples. “Let’s say you’re watching an Olivia Rodrigo video on YouTube. We would then work with YouTube to surface geo-targeted event dates for Olivia Rodrigo directly on that watch surface through APIs that connect our platforms.”

“We’ll do this same kind of partnership with Spotify, where you’re listening to her and you’re then served nearby event dates. Spotify pulls our concert information so that it’s exposed contextually within their ecosystem,” Chua says. “We’ve done it with TikTok, where we give artists the ability to add event links directly on their TikToks so that fans can consume that content but can also go to the event page on Ticketmaster without ever leaving TikTok.”

Chua and his team don’t actually work directly with artists. By means of explanation, he says to consider the vast universe of existing events. For venues that use Ticketmaster as their primary ticketing system, the company has a repository of all the events and all the associated metadata. Chua and team then partner with the tech companies (Google, Apple, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Expedia and so on) to push the data into their ecosystems so that they in turn can create content or fan experiences on their platforms.

“These are B-to-B partnerships and, from the partners’ point of view, it allows them to create relevant content for their users, who might be geo-targeted with event and concert dates from artists and sports teams they are interested in, depending on how they’re engaging with the platform,” Chua says. “In some cases, we’re driving transactions natively on those platforms as well.”

Chua says he’s always been interested in the live event and concert business (during college he worked as a concert booker), though he started his post-undergraduate career in finance. He always had an inkling that he wanted to get back into the music business, though he admits he had no idea how to pursue that path. He ended up quitting his finance job and “took a gamble” on a position at the Las Vegas Sands Corporation in Macao, China, working in entertainment business development for the casino conglomerate. In that role, he helped book Canto-Pop and K-Pop shows for the casino, long before K-Pop became an international phenomenon.

“I knew then that I wanted to work in the live entertainment business, so I decided I needed to get to L.A. and figure it out and navigate the industry. I actually wrote on my Anderson application that I wanted to work at Live Nation,” Chua says. “I put together a list of Anderson alumni who worked at Live Nation and I networked through the industry.”

The networking paid off. At a job networking event, Chua met John Loken (’09), the current EVP of marketing for the Recording Academy who was at the time overseeing the marketing department at Ticketmaster,  and landed a summer internship. Chua also credits another alumnus, Chris Adelmann (’86), now the president of CA Advisors but then an executive vice president at Live Nation overseeing business development, for helping him navigate the landscape at that company. “He gave me my first assignment. He wanted to get a read on whether there was a business for K-Pop in North America. This was maybe five years or more before BTS became a global phenomenon. He played a key role in me being able to understand the company and the live business,” Chua says.

During his second year at Anderson, Chua wrote a business plan with a few friends for a company that would crowdsource funding for live events. He parlayed that into a role with a London-based music startup. From there, he found his way back to Live Nation — which merged with Ticketmaster Entertainment in 2010 to become Live Nation Entertainment — as a director of business development in its sponsorship and media division, overseeing electronic music properties. He did that job for two years before being recruited internally to his position with Ticketmaster.

“What I love about the job is that I really identify with the experience of the fan. I love going to shows. And artists — more and more, they’re making most of their income on the road, and it’s important for them to be able to find their fans in an evolving digital environment or find their ‘super fans’ on these various platforms,” Chua says. “What’s exciting for me is working with these platforms where people are spending their time digitally, and then getting these experiences in front of fans by connecting them with the events they love.”

In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Variety recently released its third annual list of influential AAPI music executives. The must-read industry publication included Chua in the 2024 edition.

“I’m extremely honored and humbled to have even been considered. I happen to know and am friends with a number of the other honorees on that list, and they are not only leaders in their fields, but are also actively making a difference in the AAPI community,” Chua says.

In addition to his day-to-day responsibilities with Ticketmaster, Chua oversees Asian Nation, a platform focused on amplifying AAPI talent on and off stage, playing a lead role in in building and scaling the group. The New York-based Chua was recently back in L.A. programming events related to AAPI Heritage Month, including two comedy showcases that featured all Asian comics as part of the Netflix is a Joke festival in collaboration with Live Nation Comedy. He was also involved in an artist accelerator program in partnership with Gold House, a leading organization focused on AAPI representation across media and entrepreneurship. Chua, in fact, took a pause during a video shoot in Glendale with rising AAPI musicians — Towa Bird, Emei and Paravi — to conduct an interview with UCLA Anderson media.

One can’t help but wonder what Chua’s perspective is on live events outside the United States. Are there acts or musical styles thriving around the globe that haven’t caught on here yet?

“It’s a great question. I think about my experience pre-Anderson, when K-Pop was still a relatively regional phenomenon. I got that same question from Chris Adelman, asking if K-Pop could be exported to North America and wondering if there was a global business here?” Chua says. “Fast forward to where we are today. K-Pop is a global phenomenon. What’s really interesting is it’s in Korean, yet, their audience is all over the world — not only Asia, but massive audiences in North America, Europe, South America. You’re seeing a lot more of the globalization of regional music genres, from K-Pop to Latin music, finding massive global audiences. I think it’s an exciting time for music because the music itself is not geographically constrained. It’s a lot easier for artists to find fans all over the world right now, especially through some of the digital platforms who I partner with.”