Pollstar
‘Ticketing Is Hard’: What The Heck’s Happening With Independent Ticketing In 2024?
by Andy Gensler in Pollstar, October 22, 2024
Lyte ticketing’s recent bankruptcy, which led to lawsuits by promoters who claimed to have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars amidst allegations of financial malfeasance, has raised questions about the continued viability of the independent ticketing market. When you add other independent ticketing market shifts this year, including news in July of DICE attempting to sell a “major stake” in its business and in April Eventim acquiring See Tickets from Vivendi, the independent ticketing landscape, which serves primarily smaller venues, promoters and festivals, looks fraught.
Speaking to six ticketing experts, including independent ticketing entrepreneurs, execs at major ticket platforms and lawyers involved with independent ticketing, each had varying takes on the degree of challenges facing the independent ticketing market, though all resoundingly agree on the oft repeated mantra whenever ticketing is discussed: It’s hard. And it’s opaque.
“Ticketing is, first of all, very difficult,” said one ticketing executive on the condition of anonymity. “It’s capital intensive, plagued by companies that don’t have particularly good technology and it’s very competitive.”
For decades, independent ticketing companies have come, gone and/or were acquired by larger entities. With the digital revolution and the concurrent codifying of the secondary market, came such byproducts such as wildfire growth of resellers, tickets inexplicably appearing on secondary platforms at onsales and industry stakeholders reselling their ticket allotments.
In 2024, it only got worse. Now there’s hi-tech bots, speculative ticketing, legal battles over data, dependence on venture capital (which in some cases is drying up), and a softening economy. The latter has stretched much of the live ecosystem thin–including artists, venues, promoters, agents, ticketers and concertgoers—all decrying the difficulty of making ends meet.
Pollstar’s latest Q3 industry report bears this out with average ticket prices increasing 9.4% YoY which offset a 14.9% drop in average ticket sold along with a 16.7% increase in the volume of shows. The industry is fighting harder than ever to turn a profit while sales are flat and everyone’s expenses are up.
“You see ticket prices go up, bands want to make more money, but it’s also the sound guy working, the lighting guy, the bartender, the security guy,” one ticketing executive said. “They all want to make more money, everyone’s got to make more money to survive and that’s why everything is going up.”
It’s also why the standard business practice of ticketers making up-front payments to venues is an integral part of the business. Ticketing companies pay upfront money to venues and promoters, sometimes to the tune of seven figures or more depending on the building’s capacity and forecasted revenue, in exchange for an exclusive contract for a set amount of time to recoup their investment and ideally make a significant profit. This model has implicit risk and the return on investment takes time, even longer in a sluggish economy and may never happen at all. This can slow ticketing start-ups’ quest for scale and in turn hamper VC investment.
Lyte, which began as a fan-to-fan exchange, had raised $53 million since 2014, according to Crunchbase. And in a blog post on the site this past June, Lyte boasted that it had “generated more than $750 million in reservations for live events.” Yet, its business model proved unsustainable, especially without VC investment.
“The ticketing industry has gotten upside down,” said one independent ticketing expert. “In order for a new entrant to come and be successful, there needs to be a new paradigm. I don’t quite know how that happens with the expectation among venues and promoters that they’re getting an upfront payment.”
That said, there are still many independent ticketing companies successfully operating in the space and continuing to scale.
“In music, the independent market is as challenging as it’s ever been,” said Robert Davari, co-founder and CEO of Tixr, which is increasingly finding success as an independent ticketing platform. “So much consolidation has happened from the large vertically integrated players that the addressable client base has shrunk for ticketing, and the independents left are under unprecedented pressure to sell or fail…For us though, we largely bootstrapped the business, are highly profitable, our core team is intact, our product is differentiated and we address a large global market. So we’re generally thriving, even though we feel the market pressures as well.”
Brando Rich is co-founder of Cash or Trade, which operates a Face Value Ticket Exchange, in which tickets sell for face value or less with a 10% platform fee paid by the buyer and includes insurance and escrow protection. “With the recent news of companies struggling, and even closing, in the resale space, we feel this is an important time to recognize the merit of building a solid and dependable service that focuses on the customer, over scale,” Rich said. “At the end of the day, fans want to know they have a resale option in place in the chance they will not be able to attend when purchasing tickets for events that are months and months in the future. They want a protected space that is partnered directly with an event that aligns with their values and helps them connect and purchase tickets from real fans and not scalpers.”
Lawrence Peryer, who recently joined Cash Or Trade’s advisory board after working as former director, events and tickets at Amazon, as well as executive roles at Live Nation and Lyte, summed up the many industry challenges and how Cash or Trade may offer a path forward. “No one company or stakeholder has created the problems we all know exist in live event ticketing and no one company will solve them all,” he told The TicketingBusiness. “But this company is working directly with artists, venues and promoters to bring some kindness and sanity to it all.”
