The Business of Fun Podcast

March 20, 2019

Here is a wide-ranging interview I did with Dave Wakeman for his podcast, The Business of Fun. We talk about my business background and more.

Get it on the podcast’s website or stream it below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dave Wakeman: Thank you for tuning in to another edition of The Business of Fun podcast. I am your host, Dave Wakeman. My episode today is brought to you by my friends at Booking Protect, the global leaders in refund protection. To find out how you and your organization can partner with Booking Protect to offer your customers a better buying experience, more peace of mind, and create a new revenue stream for your organization, visit them at www.bookingprotect.com.

Booking Protect: the global leaders in refund protection. If you are listening to this—because it is going to be dropping on Wednesday, March twentieth—over the next two days, you’ll be able to find Booking Protect at Stand 12 at the Ticketing Professionals Conference in Birmingham, England.

You’ll also want to keep in mind that you should be constantly checking the Booking Protect blog. We are starting to produce some really great content about trends, ideas for managing and accelerating the buying process for your customers. A lot of things about conversions and remarketing and all these things that are really valuable and useful from partnering with Booking Protect and understanding the data that they have available.

You can find that at www.bookingprotect.com and click through to the blog button. My guest today is Lawrence Peryer at LYTE. Lawrence is someone I’m very excited to talk to. I met Lawrence at Intix in Dallas this year, and I was like, “My God, I’ve been following you on Twitter for years and I follow you on LinkedIn.”

Then after the fact, Lawrence reached out to me and I was like I felt like I was a big doofus compared to Lawrence because Lawrence is such a smart guy. Such a great, thoughtful person about all things tickets. So I was really excited to talk to him. And we talk about a lot on this episode.

We talk about what LYTE does, right? We talk about how the product that he works on cuts the no-show rates from maybe fifteen or twenty percent down to one to two percent. We talk about how that’s possible. We talk about how that generates revenue. We talk about the secondary market.

We talk about what your expectations will be. We talk about product integrations. We talk about some really cool stuff as far as LYTE goes, but then we get into some other stuff that’s even more fun, which is Lawrence was involved with the licensing program and creating virtual goods for Pink Floyd and I thought that was really great.

I’m not even sure—but he was also involved in doing some stuff around one of David Bowie’s albums, which I don’t know that we even got to talk about on here. We talked a little bit about Taylor Swift. We talked about festivals. We talked about his time at Amazon Music, or Amazon tickets. I’m sorry. It was just like a really great and all over the place conversation with me and Lawrence Peryer on the Business of Fun.

I want to welcome Lawrence Peryer to the Business of Fun podcast. Lawrence, what’s happening?

Lawrence Peryer: Hey, good morning. How are you?

Dave Wakeman: I’m good, man. I’m excited to have you as I told you at Intix. I am a longtime Twitter follower of yours, so then it was funny to see you, so I was like, oh, I was probably like the only person geeking out on you and I follow you on Twitter. It’s awesome.

Lawrence Peryer: I’ve been so self-conscious about it ever since because I’m like, “That’s my cranky old man persona.” I definitely have my Twitter persona. And it’s outrage and Twitter just, I guess like everybody else, it doesn’t bring out my best side all the time.

Dave Wakeman: It’s true. I try to be better at it now because I know that there’s a lot of people that pay attention to me. This was shocking to me that people paid attention to me. So I was like I gotta do a little bit better job of putting a funner public face on things instead of being a grumpy old man, or like taking the piss out of people just because they’re saying something or doing something stupid, because it doesn’t do me any good. So I was like, eh, I’ve learned to moderate my Twitter habit just a touch.

Lawrence Peryer: I’ve got something to learn from you, so thank you.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah. No. So I’m happy to teach you what little I know. But I want to—I’m excited to talk about LYTE because that’s where you’re at now, and it is a kind of product that seems to me, in line with somebody like my friends at Booking Protect. And what you’re working on there—it seems that you want to give people an opportunity if they bought a ticket to a sold-out experience and they don’t remember they want to go or they can’t go, or something comes in the way—to have a way to get rid of that ticket so that it doesn’t go unused.

Can you explain to everybody, because I’m not sure if everybody has heard of LYTE yet. Can you give us a little overview about what you’re working on right now?

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah, of course. So I’m the head of Business and Corporate Development at LYTE. It’s spelled L-Y-T-E for those of you following along at home.

LYTE really offers two functionalities for concertgoers or event attendees. One is when an event or a price level in an event sells out and is no longer available in the primary on sale, a wait list goes up on the official website for the event. And what that means is fans can then come in and instead of seeing a sold-out button that leads nowhere, it’ll say “Sold out, but you could still get tickets” or “Sold out, sign up for the wait list.”

When you’re registering for the wait list, a couple things happen. You get presented a price, which is a bit more than the primary on-sale price, but less than the then-current secondary prices. So our system is monitoring the secondary system and pricing just below the secondary. So the official website can always say it has the cheapest prices, and then you accept the price. Give us your credit card, and you now have a reservation.

The second thing that happens is the return functionality goes live. So an email goes out to all the ticket buyers and it says, “Hey, thanks so much for buying a ticket. If you can’t go to the show or if your plans change, come back to the official website and we’ll give you a refund.”

LYTE buys tickets back from people who need to return them, and we sell them to people on the wait list. And that right there is LYTE 101. So it’s a way for people who can’t use their tickets to make them available to people who really want to go.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah, that’s—it is an interesting concept to me because before we started talking, we talked about a lot of the really positive things that can happen when you offer a product like LYTE.

And then as you were explaining the process of how it works for people who wouldn’t understand it, it brought up a bunch of questions. My first one is, I think I know the answer, but I want to ask the question anyway, so that people who are listening who might be going “how do I do this?” understand it’s just an API integration, right? Like you already are integrated with some of your partners. Is that correct or no?

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah, that’s a great question. So a big part of my job is going around to primary ticketing companies and doing these API integrations so that functionally a few things happen. When you want to return your ticket, the process as a user is you enter in the barcode or whatever the unique identifier is, and our system talks to the ticketing company in the background and says, “Hey, is this a real ticket?” And when the system replies and says “yes,” that allows us to process the refund. So we give you your money back, we take the ticket, and then we talk to the ticket system a second time and we say, “Hey, restrict this ticket.” And restrict basically means cancel it, make sure it won’t work when somebody shows up at the door with it.

And then when we sell the ticket to the next person on the wait list, they get issued a brand-new ticket from the primary ticketing company the same as everybody else’s ticket. So what that does is it avoids the problem of two people showing up at the door with the same ticket. So the returned ticket is basically ripped up and thrown away, and a new ticket’s printed for the new customer.

Dave Wakeman: No, that’s helpful. Because one of—and the reason I ask it, maybe this helps—is because what I found over the years is that a lot of people wanted to try these new things and try new ideas. So I want to, as much as possible, help them understand the simple steps. So asking you that question was my way of helping people understand that working with somebody like LYTE the same way as, as I mentioned before, Booking Protect, it’s integrated into your software packages in most places.

So that it makes it simple for you and unless there’s some kind of catastrophic failure, it’s like you can forget it, you can set it and forget it. Just like what Ron Popeil said: “Set it and forget it.”

Lawrence Peryer: No, I think that’s a fair way to say it. And in fact, that’s manifested in the way some of the ticketing companies then go to market with their clients because a lot of them simply handle the sales process on our behalf. They go to their individual venues or festivals or event partner clients and say, “Hey, we have a new feature of our platform. There’s nothing you really have to do except say yes.” So I think how you described it is dead on.

Dave Wakeman: And another interesting thing you brought up was about the secondary pricing so that the official website could always have the most competitive pricing.

I get how and why you monitor the secondary market for the pricing. One of the things though, is if you’re a consumer that is not necessarily going to be able to make it to a show, what is the incentive to sell the ticket on LYTE as opposed to sell it on maybe a StubHub or Ticketmaster Plus or any of the other markets? Because you maybe make a couple bucks if you sell it on the secondary market yourself.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah, no, that’s a very fair question. I think there’s two answers and one answer is—I’ll call it a softer one. And it’s how you can see how some of our partners position LYTE. So if you go to the Mumford and Sons website for example, they do a really good job of saying to their fans, “Look, we don’t like the situation in ticketing. It can be a scary marketplace. There’s price gouging, there’s fraud. Do the right thing. If you can’t use your ticket, we found these guys LYTE. Use them because it’s better for the community. Help us solve the problem. We can’t solve it alone.”

So there’s a fan community aspect to it, but I think more practically speaking it’s just—you want to return your ticket. I bought my ticket, the festival is six months from now. My wife got pregnant. I changed jobs. I moved. A lot of life happens in six months and some people just want their money back.

They don’t want to deal with Venmo and Craigslist and StubHub and meeting somebody at a bar and they work all day. Like they just want to return their ticket. And I think that’s the piece of the market. There’s ten, fifteen, twenty percent of event attendees. That’s just what they need and want to do.

And it’s the same version of “set it and forget it” that the venue gets. The customer just gets a way to walk back up to the official website, enter in their barcode, and get their money back and be done with it.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah. And this is going to sound strange to some of the people listening to this podcast, but the Mumford and Sons example speaks to me right in my point of view on some of this stuff, because a lot of the bands and performers and acts that are going to most benefit from something like LYTE—this is my opinion—are going to be bands who are in a position like Mumford and Sons or Ed Sheeran or Pearl Jam, or any of those bigger bands who are going to sell out their shows no matter what. They don’t need the assistance of the secondary market to help them sell a ticket. They can sell a ticket. And the community aspect of going to their shows is such a big thing. And as you were talking about Mumford and Sons, I was going, when I go to—when I travel to go see Pearl Jam shows—that community’s there, right?

There’s Facebook groups where people are like, “Here is face value, I just want to make sure you can get in, brother.” And that’s really just like the Grateful Dead kind of thing. So that’s really, I think, an important thing because it also highlights a thing that I think we need to be more conscious of in entertainment, which is the fact that these shows and these events are community.

And I think by inspiring and encouraging the community aspect of it, it probably has a real host of positive unintended consequences. One of which I know that we talked about before, and I would be failing in my job of hosting this or knowing how people make money in a lot of cases, was the no-show policy and how it’s had an impact on your customers as far as not just reducing the number of no-shows, but I would call it a radical reduction in no-show rates.

I want you to explain it because I don’t know that I would do it justice because the numbers are really awesome.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. And they’re real, and they’re repeatable, and they are consistent across events, whether it’s a 200-seat room or an 80,000-seat festival. And what you’re alluding to is the fact that even when an event sells out, it’s not uncommon at all. In fact, it’s very common to only see maybe eighty, eighty-five percent of the people walk through the turnstiles. So there’s fifteen, twenty percent of the people that bought tickets and they just never show up. And that’s been a consistent problem, like I said, across event types, but also across years.

And it just gets factored into the way a lot of venues do business and how they think about their business. And so what happens with LYTE is what we truly are seeing is that fifteen percent of the people—those are the LYTE customers—they’re the ones that return their tickets. They now have a solution that doesn’t force them to go to Craigslist or go to a third-party marketplace. They don’t want to be small business people with their tickets. They just want to return them. And this gives them a way to do that.

The other side of that is there’s all this demand sitting there on the wait list of people who really want to go to the show, but got shut out. Now they buy those tickets, they can use them. And what we find and what we’re seeing with our clients is they’re saying now there’s one or two percent no-show rates. And that’s phenomenal because what you and I talked about before, and which, from your background, all those people are coming in and maybe they’re paying for parking, which the venue participates in, or they’re buying T-shirts that the band and the venue participates in, or they’re buying food and beverage, which is where the margin is for so many of these small business owners.

And you can really do the math if your per head is five, ten, twenty, thirty bucks a night. And even a small club’s getting another twenty or thirty people in there a show, and you multiply that across a couple hundred shows a year. It starts to become real money. Not only that those people get to put in their pocket, but that they get to put back into their patron experience, that they get to put back into business expansion.

And quite honestly, a lot of them are putting it back into talent. They’re pricing all this new revenue into the offers they make the artists. So in a very cool roundabout way, it helps the artist make more money too. So I can be accused of being overly enthusiastic on this point, but it’s an amazing impact on the ecosystem that we love to see happen. It’s really cool.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah, no I realized that as we were talking, I was going, “Wow, this is—” I don’t want this to sound like I’m doing an advertisement for LYTE because I try not to ever be so product-centric in the way I ask questions or things, but I was like, “This is fantastic.” When you take—you increase your—you cut your no-shows by like eighty-five or ninety percent or more, and you think about the numbers.

Because we were just throwing numbers out and simple ones. It pretty quickly can become a quarter million, a half million, a million dollars. And then when you get the big shows, millions and millions of dollars very quickly. And if you’re operating on very thin margins, that’s the difference between staying in business and going out of business or being able to produce the event annually, or just having it be a one-off thing.

It really is that powerful. And it’s something that I try to really preach for people is being creative in the ways that you look for and find revenue because creativity is really the limit to how you find your revenue and just getting people in the door is the number one way to make more money.

And solving that problem is just unbelievable.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah, it’s exciting. And there’s a couple of smaller corollaries to that, which is we have what I would call statistically zero churn rate on the client side. There may be clients that left, but I can’t name any. And certainly none of our larger partners or larger venues, like once you start using LYTE, it’s a feature that you don’t want—first of all, you don’t want to take it away from your customers because that’s just awkward. But it’s a solution that’s working for their businesses because, let’s just be pragmatic. If it wasn’t working for their businesses, they wouldn’t keep it going.

And for customers, the most amazing thing is once you use LYTE once or twice, you start to expect it. And that’s been a very interesting phenomenon. Like our customer service team gets these inquiries and says, “Oh, I used LYTE to buy my tickets to the BottleRock Festival and it was so awesome. I have tickets to Justin Timberlake and I can’t go. Can I return my tickets? Or why can’t I return my tickets? Why doesn’t this work at every venue?” There’s a nice groundswell on both the client side and the fan side. That’s super fun to be in the middle of.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah, no it really is. We were talking about design thinking and how that maybe should apply more to the entertainment industry before. And this just fits right in because we have to be more customer-focused, right? And the thing is, by being more customer-focused, we’re just incentivizing people to do what they want to do anyway, which is spend money on experiences.

Who am I to say, “Hey, look, I’d love for you to spend money on my experience, but let me make you jump through a lot of hurdles.” How about, “Let me make less hurdles, so you’ll just give me more of your money.” That’s really what this is and that’s what I was excited about.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. Making it easy and adding value.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah. That’s the key. Adding the value. Now, another thing that you worked on—so that I can’t be accused of doing an infomercial for LYTE, even though I think the product’s great. And every—if I ever put my name behind some of these endorsements, I truly do believe this, Lawrence is not paying me. Even though you’ll probably buy me a drink the next time we see each other, but that’s fine—is one of, I was doing some research and I saw that you worked on something that I thought was awesome which was Pink Floyd’s digital merchandise rights.

And I wanted to ask that because I was like, “This is fantastic, this is really cool.” Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. So people who’ve known me for a while or in my professional life will know that I went through this brief, but intense obsession with virtual goods around ten or so years ago.

And yeah, I was just obsessed with the notion of in-game commerce and customization. But also it really came from my background—to give you just two seconds of context, my career has always lived at the intersection of artists and fans, either helping them build community so they could communicate back and forth, or build business connections so that artists could make money in a direct-to-consumer context.

But this idea of—I guess fifteen years ago it was called tribes, that was the big thing. And this idea of you want the badge for your tribe. It’s why people wear T-shirts and hats and buttons and badges and carrying that into the virtual world was something I became a little bit annoyingly obsessed with.

And a very old colleague of mine had the merchandise rights for Pink Floyd for a very long time, and still does, and worked with the band for many decades. And I convinced him hope against hope to allow me to put together a virtual goods licensing program for the band.

And that’s what we did. There are platforms that don’t even really exist anymore unfortunately. But we did some really interesting things. Because what was happening at the time was, it was all—it was a replay of the real world where in all these virtual worlds, people were making their own clothing, their own insignias. And copyright infringement was rampant. And so the program we came up with was, there was a line of clothing and items that we made that were official, but then we also provided a set of assets so that people could make their own virtual goods to sell and make a royalty on.

And it was a really cool program. It was a little bit of a—I don’t want to call it a flash in the pan, I don’t think it was. It never really became a mainstream product. But it was a really cool look. The band were—they were excited because they’ve always been innovators. And it was just a cool, fun project.

Dave Wakeman: It’s interesting to me because I do remember I think it was like the Sims, I don’t know if the Sims is still around, but it was huge when it first was able to do the Sims online and so you didn’t have to have the hard disk. You could just download the copy and a lot of that stuff lived in the cloud or went back and forth between computers and the internet and so I was going, “This is really great.” And I guess maybe what has happened is your idea was right, it was just that the monetization became more difficult because, I think you can do all that stuff now with like Snapchat skins and all these different things that they have. So I think you were right. It was just that the monetization model got changed on underneath you. But it’s still a really cool thing.

Because who—what guy, or hopefully girl our age doesn’t love Pink Floyd at the same time. It’s a really great thing. What you said though that was interesting to me is two things, right? Which is that you’ve always been at the middle of the artist and the fans, and then you talked about direct-to-consumer things.

And it seems a little bit to me that maybe the next evolution or maybe the evolution that’ll make things a little bit more sustainable for people over the long term is working more direct to the consumer fans because you build this tribe and tribes—I remember the book by Seth Godin that was really huge in business circles for a while. Why do you think that, or do you think people of artists are doing a better job of going direct to their consumers and building these relationships and maintaining them over time? Or do you think there’s a lot of work that could be done as far as that goes?

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah, I don’t know that I have an either-or answer, but what I will say is I think there were certain bands that always had a direct-to-consumer aspect of their business, even though they didn’t think of it that way. And the Grateful Dead’s probably the towering model of that with their newsletter list from the early seventies and mail-order catalogs and mail-order tickets, gave birth to obviously Phish, Dave Matthews, your boys, Pearl Jam, Metallica. This notion really took hold with a certain subset of artists and frankly artists that tended to be part of the community, a scene, always had a direct-to-fan connection and typically a commercial one.

So I put those bands aside a little bit because they were always there and they built a model. But they didn’t evangelize it for anybody other than themselves. They always said, “This is the way we do it. Maybe it doesn’t work for everybody else.”

I think what really started to happen was the two—to me, the two big seminal events are the distribution capabilities and the communication capabilities of the internet. Obviously, the ability for an artist to put up a website and finally have something in their career that was part creative tool, part marketing tool, and part demand aggregation. So in other words, you would make a record and it would have music on it, and it might have artwork and it might come with cool packaging, and you put it out into the world. And it was completely different from the marketing campaign.

The artists didn’t necessarily, by and large, treat the marketing campaign as part of the art. They let somebody else do the marketing. Your website, it’s all one thing. It can be an artistic medium, it could be a sales tool, it could be a community forum. So I think that notion made artists start to think a little bit differently about how they access their consumers.

But the really big thing was Napster and the sort of rapid implosion of the recorded music business. In the same twelve or eighteen-month period, you had the biggest-selling first-week CD of all time with *NSYNC, and then you had the bottom just completely fall out of the recorded music business and those struggles of the next few years, which by the way, the labels have turned around in a masterful way.

I think that forced artists to have to be entrepreneurial and have to think a little bit differently and have to think about the other parts of their business in a way that they didn’t have to think about before. So I guess it’s necessity being the mother of invention and trying to find other ways to put food on the table.

Because the popular idea is that these are rock stars who live lives of opulence and have all the money in the world. But not everybody does. And it’s a select few and it’s the same 80-20 and maybe even more extreme that applies everywhere else. And even the really successful people carry a lot of overhead. They have organizations, they have households, they have children, they have hangers-on, they have fears of the future. And so I think it was the digital revolution that touched everything else. And then it was the real specific issues around their primary business imploding.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah, no, that’s a really good answer. And probably you approached it from a way I wouldn’t have thought about because one of—and I was asking it because I have probably two big hypotheses that I come back to or questions I come back to over and over again whenever I’m talking to anybody.

And one of them is just like, how can we help make everybody involved in the world of entertainment and tickets and sports and everything, better marketers? Because I feel like so much of so many of the challenges we’re dealing with are directly related to either bad marketing habits or just not understanding the importance of marketing and what marketing well looks like.

And then the other one, which I don’t think I’ll bore you with this one, is that—are people using data the right way? Which I think they’re not. I think they use it to make all their decisions instead of test hypotheses. But that’s usually the trick question I spring on people and so that’s why I was asking the question because I’m always conscious—I’m always really worried that we’re marketing in ways that are, and building experiences in ways that are harmful to the overall long-term health of the industry. And I’ve taken a lot of heat over the—and until the next tour I won’t be proven right or wrong because I thought that some of the stuff that Taylor Swift did on her last tour was a little bit—her fans were going to react poorly to that over the long term. And so that’s why I was asking the question. As far as fan development goes and understanding, going direct to your consumer and the trust that you have to build with your audience over time, and that if you break that trust, it often is gone. It just doesn’t come back.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. The thing I’m curious about with the Taylor Swift model is that, and I don’t have as forceful of a take on it quite yet developed as you do. For me, the jury’s out a little bit because I’m wondering if it’s a generational thing and that’s what I don’t fully feel I have a feel for yet, is that it may just be different now the same way where the generation of music fans that came before us were revolted by the idea of commercials or music being used in movies and TV shows and sponsorships. And for our generation I’ve never been to a show, at least not in the last twenty, twenty-five years that wasn’t sponsored.

One of the most successful properties going is the Warped Tour, and nobody’s ever offended by that. They do a wonderful job of using branding in a way that adds value to the—it’s just done smartly. But a generation ago that would’ve been shocking. And so I don’t—I’m a little slower to draw a conclusion on that one because I think maybe I might be a little out of touch with what happened.

Dave Wakeman: No, that’s fair. That’s completely fair. I was just worried more that, and this has nothing actually really to do with Taylor Swift. It has to do with everybody, because I see it with sports and I see it everywhere, which is like, “I’m going to sell you a ticket, Lawrence, I’m going to sell you a ticket at a hundred bucks, right? Because you’re one of my biggest fans. And then all of a sudden Dave comes along. Dave’s not as big of a fan, but there’s not enough Lawrence is in the crowd, so I’m going to sell Dave a ticket next to Lawrence for fifty bucks.” And that’s really where my issue with these things come as far as the monetization thing.

I think it’s great because hopefully it means that some of these sponsorships and partnerships allow more people to see shows more affordably. That’s what I hope for. It’s just more like when I talk about bad marketing practices, there’s an untamed addiction to discounts I see. And that’s what I really saw on a grand scale with the Taylor Swift thing that made me pause. But you could be right. It could be a generational thing and people just don’t care. At which point I would be wrong. And I would have to admit that if it was a generational thing, that I was out of touch with what the changing taste of consumer habits are too, which would be bad for the brand.

Lawrence Peryer: I think there’s other phenomenon going on, which is when it’s an artist-specific—I’m always empathetic with the artists because they’re not always sure that there’s going to be a next time. And I don’t pretend to be in the head of Taylor Swift or any other artist at any other age range, but I do know there’s frequently this notion of “we’re focused on this cycle.”

And even though they could be thinking about a brand and a career, so much energy goes into a two or three-year cycle that maybe money doesn’t get left on the table. Maybe that happens. I think where you see it contrasted is in the festival business. The festival promoters and event producers are some of the smartest, savviest, fan-friendly, hippest, most innovative, thoughtful people around.

They think long-term. You look at Coachella, this is the twentieth year. And I don’t think Coachella would’ve lasted twenty years if they took every dollar off the table every year and weren’t thoughtful about ticket pricing and scaling and how they integrate sponsors, how they developed the physical site.

It’s different every time you go, and they’re the crowned example of it. But so many festivals operate that way. And that to me is a generational shift that’s happened through my career. That blows my mind. Just the advent and the scale of the US festival scene.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah. It’s very—I don’t know if it came out today or yesterday or the day before, but there was a couple articles about the way that Coachella has continued to innovate with their pricing too. And I think it’s great because again, it goes back, I think it was a Bill Graham story that Seth Godin shared.

And it was like he asked, I think he met him early in his career and he was asking him, “Why don’t you charge an extra dollar or two more?” And he’s going, “But if I take every dollar, every time, who’s going to fill my building next week?” And it is the same thing.

And I think if you have a building, it gives you the opportunity to be a little more conscious of the need to leave a little money on the table all the time. And it is tough when you’re put in the position where you don’t know if there’s going to be a next time because those acts are fewer and farther between. The longer we—the further down the path we get.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. And tastes change. And artists work so hard to stay relevant and stay in touch and stay innovative and evolve as just creative people. And you never know if that’s going to hit with your audience next time. So it’s the music business for a reason.

Dave Wakeman: Oh yeah. And it is tough. I think people who talk to—I’m sure it goes to you too when they ask you and they’re like, “Oh, it must be so much fun and it must be like everything’s like puppies and rainbows” and you go “it’s really a hard job.” It is fun, but it is really difficult because you’re dealing with probably as many variables as anybody. Maybe the only thing that’s maybe more tenuous than what people are going to listen to or go see is fashion. It’s a really difficult thing and in that line, I want to ask you a couple questions about your time with Amazon Music—Amazon tickets—because I think that a lot of people felt like Amazon was going to have the ability to market and sell and penetrate the market in a way that was going to be transformative.

And if there’s anything that you don’t feel comfortable talking about, you let me know because I don’t want to burn anybody or anything. But I was just curious because I had high hopes for Amazon tickets and so can you share a little bit about your experience there?

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah, and I want to be respectful of the way Amazon operates in terms of, they as an entity don’t really comment on things they’re doing or not doing, although I suppose it’s changed a little bit. So I’ll give you a couple of different answers. My personal answer is Jesus Christ, it was a fascinating place to work. I was talking to my significant other last night on a different, but I guess related topic, and we were talking about how there were just some problems in ticketing that Amazon tried to solve and they were able to solve things that were problems for years and years, and they solved them in a couple of weeks because of the scale and the scale of the talent and the scale of just the raw brain power there.

I went to work every day and I was like, “I must have gotten graded on a curve to be allowed in this place.” It was fascinating people. They’re very culture and mission-driven. It’s definitely a bit of a reality distortion field there. Insular in a way, but so obsessively focused on customer and customer experience.

It’s just a very gratifying and interesting place to work as it related specifically to the tickets business. I just think—I don’t think they’re done with it. I think they’re just done with the way we were looking at it, because I just saw yesterday announced an Alexa deal with Ticketmaster for event discovery.

Not sure if it includes ticket purchase. I didn’t have a chance to look that deeply. But the thing about Amazon is they’re relentless and they don’t think in terms of months and quarters, and they don’t really care if they get it wrong a few times. And I think there was a sense that our approach at that time wasn’t the right one for that time.

But it doesn’t look like they’re done thinking about it. I don’t have any particular insight into what’s going on anymore than anybody else there or member of the public. But I think that would be the way I would summarize it is that just version one of the approach wasn’t the one they thought was going to lead to massive success and they measure success in ways a lot different than us mere mortals do. There’s a different bar for success for them than there is for us.

Dave Wakeman: Actually, the way you answered it too is what I was more interested in because I expected that Amazon was going to be able—I know some smart—everybody I know there is way smarter than I am. And I was like and I saw “hey, you’re dealing with these problems that really need to be solved.” And I think it as much as anything, right? Everybody’s—if you ask people, if you poll them at Intix, I think they’d be like “I can’t believe Amazon got knocked out by Ticketmaster and Live Nation and all these industry people.”

I think it highlights as much as anything some of the challenges that the industry’s dealing with and the need to be more creative and more aggressive in the way that we’re tackling problems as much as anything. That’s the way I saw what happened with version one of Amazon tickets.

Because I do think that Amazon has the wealth of data and they have a customer focus and they are relentless in delivering value to their customers. That I thought—I still think—is key to cracking open the code of selling more tickets.

Because even if you take out all the tickets that are sold currently, which is billions and billions of dollars. I think—somebody we know, a guy called Steven Klickstein, we were talking about this in the pod—there’s fifty-eight billion dollars of tickets that go unsold around the world.

So there’s still plenty of opportunity to tackle and sell tickets that aren’t being sold. And so when I look at Amazon, I’m going, if they can’t solve it, then I’m not sure who could.

Lawrence Peryer: I think the two things that still break my heart, that I can’t reconcile is that one, there is a perception in the industry that we failed when really we just chose to stop doing something that we didn’t see leading to massive scale.

And the corollary answer to that is that somehow the industry thinks Live Nation or Ticketmaster were hostile. And I have to tell you, I think that people have an incorrect perception of that entity because they’re doing a lot of interesting deals. They’re doing a lot of interesting commerce partnerships.

They’re doing—this is not an inflexible monolith that people are dealing with, and they never treated us disrespectfully or fearfully. It was just a matter of “we have this massive scale business that we have called Live Nation Ticketmaster. We’re not just going to give you the keys to the front door. You gotta make a deal that works for us.”

But they never said, “Amazon, we don’t want you in this business.” In fact, quite the contrary, the ecosystem was excited about Amazon coming into the business. I just think that in version one, we didn’t have an interesting enough way to do it. So that’s just my personal defensiveness about it.

Because I loved the idea so much, but I think they’re going to figure it out. And I think when they do Amazon and Ticketmaster and AEG and your local promoter and your local ticket company are all going to make a lot of money and please a lot of fans. And I’ll just sit back in my chair and say “I remember way back when.”

Dave Wakeman: See? And I’m glad you took the question in that way because that was the thing I was going—hey, look, if you’re not trying anything, if you’re not swinging, because Amazon has a tendency to swing for the fences, right? They go big, but because it’s not worth their time to get into singles and just go for everything you want because if you fail, hey it really is as much invested in failing small as there is failing big in a lot of ways, especially at this scale. And the other thing is that the idea that Ticketmaster and Live Nation would be hostile—they’re in the business of moving tickets.

Anybody who can help them move tickets is their friend. I’ve learned that more and more recently. If your ideas are helping them move tickets, it’s great because there is still so much inventory that’s unsold. So there’s a lot of money for everybody to make.

If we can just solve some of the underlying problems, which, you know, of helping people find out about events, pricing them and making them accessible to people, creating experiences that people want to spend their money and their attention on. If you or I walked into the Ticketmaster office, they wouldn’t throw us out if we thought we could make them money. So that’s just really the way—that’s the way I’ve found that’s the biggest thing about that.

Lawrence Peryer: And I’ll say it one other way, which is the thing that some people view as either hostile or unwelcoming about working with them, it comes from them being—for lack of a better way to say it—a bit smart and confident about who they are and what they’re good at. They know where they need help. They don’t need help selling front-row tickets to Beyoncé at the Hollywood Bowl. They’ve got that. They can do that all day long. They do it at scale.

It’s actually hard to do, and they do it really well in terms of the technical infrastructure and getting—and I think anybody that gets into primary ticketing is underestimating the challenge. But there are distressed inventory pockets and markets and events and other things that everybody wrestles with.

It’s when you walk in the front door and say “Give me the first twenty rows of Beyoncé and I’m going to go make 10x with it and pay you your normal price” that they look at you and say, “I’m not really interested. Thank you very much.”

Dave Wakeman: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Which is—we talked about this before and I’ll let my—I’ll say this one. You don’t have to say this one. I don’t want to put this one on you. I’ll put it completely on me so that all the hate email comes to me. But it seems to be one of the big challenges that LYTE is dealing with when it talks about shutting down the secondary market a little bit is that the secondary market wants to walk in and go, “Hey, I’ll help you sell your front-row tickets that you’re already selling.”

And I always have thought that one of the really missed opportunities for everybody is focus on turnover and getting the people into the edges on the distressed areas that’ll create a lot of money, a lot of opportunity for people. And it gives people a really big hunk of meat to chaw on, I guess, if we’re being honest.

Lawrence Peryer: It’s an interesting phenomenon these days that the two portions of the venues that sell out the fastest are the front and the back. It’s that fat middle that’s really hard to sell. The pricing on the—the price-to-value isn’t as clear to people. You get the high roller who doesn’t have a lot of time and will pay anything to have the best seats.

And then you get the average Joe who just wants to go to the show and is okay paying fifty bucks and sitting in the back. But it’s that middle of the room that’s really challenging. The industry’s smart. They’re figuring it out. Dynamic pricing is, I think, impressive yield management. I think sometimes it looks like the business is moving slow. It’s an incumbent business and the incumbents are still there.

They’ve been there my whole career. Nobody has truly fundamentally disrupted ticketing. And I just don’t believe—I don’t believe that’s really where the opportunity is. I believe that there’s a thriving ecosystem that is open to new ideas, but they’re ruthlessly smart business people.

Dave Wakeman: That’s right. Yeah. And I was going to say, I think that the opportunity is not trying to blow anybody out of the water. It’s going, “Hey, I see—I’m a fairly competent person, and I see that you’re struggling here. I think I have an idea that can help you.”

And then you show that return on investment. And then, every business, every wise business person I’ve met is always happy to invest in a sharp return on investment. And I think that’s where everybody should be focusing on, not “how can I disrupt something,” but “how can I add value?”

Because Ticketmaster has been around way before probably either one of us, and I’m sure they’ll be there way after we’re long gone and sitting on our rocking chairs in the backyard.

Lawrence Peryer: The one other comment I’d make is on what you said about LYTE’s position vis-à-vis the secondary marketplace.

I think we’re not anti-anybody. And I think we can be accused of having spoken that language at times. And I think we’re evolving away from that because it’s not a very attractive thing. We’re not anti-anybody. What we are is we’re pro-industry and we’re pro-fan.

And so what that means is we want to combat fraud and we want to combat price gouging. There are very legitimate secondary players who fit into the ecosystem. Put money in the artist’s pocket. Serve a section of the fan base to whom pricing is not an object, and quite frankly serve a section of the audience where they’re getting dirt-cheap tickets.

I went to go to a baseball game towards the end of this—I won’t name the team because I don’t know if they like this look. I got a ticket about twenty-five rows off the back of home plate for thirteen dollars, but I got it on StubHub because that means somebody bought a whole lot of ticket inventory for that team through the whole season and priced it like a portfolio.

And they made a lot of money at the high end of the portfolio. And then they had a lot of chaff they just needed to get rid of. And that last week, that last week of games when the team was out of contention and a lame team was in from out of town. That was a cheap ticket and I got to go to a game.

So the secondary provides a really valuable role. I just think the way it’s going to evolve is the primary rights holders are going to get smarter and smarter about clawing more of that revenue back directly into their own pockets.

Dave Wakeman: And even my comment about the secondary market is in no way, shape, or form—because anybody who’s listened to this thing for any period of time knows that some of my greatest successes and projects has been with the secondary market. It’s just more that I try to explain it to brokers, and you’ve explained it as eloquently as I ever could.

You have to look at it from “where can I add value?” And you have to manage it like a portfolio. And you have to always be looking for ways that you can create differentiation for yourself. And the way you described it is exactly how I tell brokers to approach it if they want to be in the business for the long term and be a valuable part of the industry and the ecosystem. It’s not just going as the example I used of, “let me help you sell your top, your first ten rows of seats,” because nobody really needs the help with that, right?

It’s just that’s not the case. Maybe you gain access to some of that stuff by eating a lot of the other stuff and helping distribute a lot of the other stuff. But that’s a different thing than just coming in and having it be completely one-sided. It’s just not an effective way to do business, and people are smart enough to know that.

Lawrence Peryer: In general, having a sense of entitlement won’t get you far.

Dave Wakeman: We’re both very entitled people. So if anybody who’s seen us—or at least, also very serious about ourselves.

Lawrence Peryer: That’s exactly—that’s a good thing that’s taken on me enough times. I figure I may as well just do it myself. Head it off at the pass.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah, I figured—this is my way of putting it, is if there’s a joke to be told about me, I’ll go ahead and tell it and get it out of the way because it’s totally fine.

But Lawrence, how can everybody find you on the internet here?

Lawrence Peryer: Pretty much every social media platform I have the same username, which is Lawrence Peryer. Lawrence with A-W-L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E-P-E-R-Y-E-R. There’s a lawrenceperyer.com, which is basically my résumé. But yeah, I’m around, I’m on Twitter, Instagram, not on Facebook anymore.

I’m on LinkedIn. lperyer@gmail.com. I always love to talk to anybody who wants to talk. I love to banter around good ideas. I love to get pitched. I love to get criticized. I love to have a beer bought for me. If you buy me two, I’ll buy you one in return. But yeah I would love to hear from people, especially if there was anything we said here that excites them.

Dave Wakeman: Yeah, Lawrence is very unhappy about hours. “You buy him two, he’ll buy you one.” Lawrence, thanks for doing this, man.

Lawrence Peryer: All right, Dave, thank you for having me.

Dave Wakeman: Once again, I want to thank my guest Lawrence Peryer from LYTE for taking the time to speak with me on the Business of Fun podcast. As always, you can find out what I’m up to by visiting my website at www.davewakeman.com.

You can also follow me on Twitter at David Wakeman. Remember, if you know the person who has the @DaveWakeman Twitter handle, tell them to let me have it. I really want it. I’d love it if you’d connect with me on LinkedIn as well. I’m also going to drop the audio of my free webinar. I’m going to start to do some more webinars soon.

I think they turned out very well. But look for that also in your podcast app. As always, if you have some thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, suggestions for guests, email them to me. My name dave@davewakeman.com. And if you like what I’m doing on the podcast, I’d love it if you’d subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. This stuff helps make people be able to find a podcast more readily, and it helps ensure that I can continue to deliver really great content for you. One final ask, if you’ve liked any of these episodes, if they’ve been valuable to you, would you please share with just one person? I’d love that. It’d be really helpful along with leaving a review or subscribing. All of those things I really do value your attention.

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