The concert tickets site LiveNation and the music recommendation engine Last.fm are announcing a partnership today. As part of the deal, Last.fm users will have access to US and Canadian concert information and links to buy tickets. Since Last.fm identifies your music tastes, we can safely assume that the tickets available will be targetted to individuals based on their favorite genres and bands.
Aside from selling downloads, CDs and DVDs through affiliate partnerships (with Amazon and iTunes, mainly), ticket sales are another obvious monetization strategy for these sites. We saw some controversy around the decision by Pandora to trial in-stream audio ads: some users found them intrusive, while others felt they were necessary to pay for the service. It now looks less likely that Pandora will continue to run those ads, and they'd be wise to look at other ways of making money - building out a social network and monetizing those pageviews with web-based ads, plus selling more real-world items, as Last.fm is doing. I really doubt the ticket sales will amount to much revenue for Last.fm, but every bit little helps.