Ticketing
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Ticketing company Lyte appears to have gone out of business, shutting down its website, laying off its staff and leaving a number of concert promoters unpaid for hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of tickets sold on the platform.
Lyte founder and chief executive Ant Taylor has resigned from the company, according to multiple sources, with an emergency board/creditors effort underway to try to identify a potential buyer that could repay the fans and promoters affected by shutdown, which one source said felt akin to being “ghosted.” Currently, the company’s website is offline and has been for days, having been replaced by an image that says “Be Back Soon,” with smaller text reading, “Our website is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. We should be back shortly.”
Having launched the company in 2014, Taylor raised about $53 million in four major funding rounds, with his biggest investors believed to be Chamath Palihapitiya from Silicon Valley VC Social Capital and New York hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman. Neither Taylor nor representatives for Lyte responded to requests for comment.
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Lyte billed itself as a fan-to-fan ticket exchange where fans could list tickets to events they couldn’t attend and ethically resell those tickets to other fans wanting to attend a concert. But Lyte’s own clients say the company’s business model had changed and that the company helped promoters scalp their high-end tickets and VIP festival tickets — quietly splitting the profits with event organizers.
It wasn’t uncommon for a major indie festival promoter to have several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of ticketing inventory listed on the Lyte system, explained one attorney representing potentially more than a $1 million in cumulative claims against Lyte. High profile clients for Lyte included Baja Beach festival, the Lost Lands festival in Ohio, Pitchfork Music Festival and Newport Folk Festival, although it’s unclear which events are owed money by Lyte.
A worse fate potentially awaits clients who signed up for Lyte’s primary ticketing platform. As recently as Sept. 9 the Lyte blog was announcing new clients for that initiative, including Digilogue Days, an October event in Brooklyn that billed itself as a meeting point for “music executives, artists, creatives, students and aspiring professionals with the tools and knowledge to shape the future of the music industry.” Today, Digilogue Days’ ticketing page has the same “be back soon” message that has come to replace nearly all of Lyte’s known web footprint.
The worst-case scenario for any primary ticketing clients would be if Lyte went out of business without paying its clients any of the revenue from tickets it had sold on their behalf. For small event organizers, that could equal nearly all of an event’s revenue.
If Lyte has to file for insolvency protection, it would fall into the hands of a bankruptcy trustee to sort through the details. But attorneys for several festival clients are hoping to pull their clients’ money out of the venture before it goes into administration.
“It would be totally unacceptable if any of my clients’ money was co-mingled with Lyte’s operational funds,” said one attorney who did not wish to speak on the record. “If that happened, the board of directors will be forced to account for those funds, even if that means piercing the corporate veil and going after their ability to raise money.”
Scalpers hoping to earn a big payout flipping Chappell Roan tickets likely just watched their profits vanish after the singer announced she was shutting down resellers charging outrageous markups for her Oct. 1 show in Franklin, Tenn.
The news was greeted with praise by fans who have watched the “Good Luck, Babe!” singer’s star rise to new heights this summer — as well as by questions from ticket buyers wondering how the singer was able to call a mulligan on tickets she’d already sold to ensure actual fans get to attend her show instead.
The answer isn’t totally clear — Roan’s reps did not respond to Billboard‘s requests for comment — but there’s enough information already available about the Franklin show to tell part of the story. It’s also worth noting that Roan isn’t the first artist to deal with scalpers trying to mark up fan-friendly $30 lawn tickets to as high as $900; in years past, major artists like Ed Sheeran and Eric Church, among others, have utilized the same strategy. And while not a perfect system, it’s still an impactful way to ensure that more fans have access to affordable tickets.
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In many ways, for a breakthrough artist like Roan, there are worse problems to have. Over the last year, thanks to the success of her 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, her work as a supporting act on Olivia Rodrigo‘s Guts World Tour and her breakout performances this summer at Lollapalooza and Coachella, Roan, as some say in music business parlance, is the blowing the f— up. Now, as with any big star, scalpers are taking advantage.
In one less extensive example of this, tickets for Roan’s Oct. 2 show at Walmart Amphitheatre near Rogers, Ark., were originally priced between $30 and $80 when they went on sale in June. Now, they’re selling for $300 to $1,200 on StubHub and other secondary sites — though in that case, only a couple dozen tickets, out of 11,000 total capacity, appear to be listed on StubHub.
But in Franklin, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, more resale tickets on sale for the show at the 7,500-capacity FirstBank Amphitheater. Located just 20 miles south of Nashville, Franklin is a much bigger music market than Rogers, and the price gouging for tickets apparently prompted someone from her team to work with reps from Ticketmaster to find out who is scalping those tickets and take them away from those responsible.
Catching scalpers on Ticketmaster, especially after a sale has been made, isn’t particularly complicated. While there are laws governing ticket ownership and rights, in most cases ticketing companies treat tickets like revocable licenses, meaning they have the right to disable tickets that a fan purchased and refund them their money if they are caught violating Ticketmaster’s terms of service.
For example, many scalpers will try to buy up as many tickets as possible using multiple credit cards. That’s a violation of Ticketmaster’s “limit per order” policy, which limits the number of tickets that can be purchased per order based on the event and demand for tickets.
Ticketmaster prohibits users from using multiple IP addresses or email addresses when buying tickets, so if someone successfully completed a purchase of a Chappell Roan ticket but was later found to have used multiple email addresses or a VPN to hide their IP addresses, that could be grounds for their tickets to be canceled and refunded. It wouldn’t take long for a couple of Ticketmaster executives to comb through the transactions for a 15,000-capacity show and find purchases tied to bots with no IP addresses, or large purchases from newly-created accounts linked to free email services.
Once those transactions are identified, most are investigated and the purchases canceled. In Roan’s case, the canceled tickets were pooled and sold via lottery to fans who had to register in advance for a shot at buying them. Though it’s unclear how many tickets were canceled and reissued to fans, it’s unlikely that more than a few hundred tickets were involved.
While this practice is popular with fans and punishes amateur scalpers, there is an argument to be made that, in some cases, it enriches professional scalpers who are better at avoiding detection by reducing the number of tickets available on resale sites and in turn driving up the price for those tickets that aren’t taken down.
But the effort isn’t specifically aimed at eliminating all ticket scalping. Instead, it’s about randomly disrupting the predatory practices of scalpers targeting vulnerable shows by rising artists like Roan who don’t want to charge fans hundreds of dollars to see their concerts. And by focusing on high-margin shows where scalpers are set to make big paydays, artists like Roan really can impact the pocketbooks of professional ticket resellers and help keep more of their tickets affordable for fans.
Sturgill Simpson is keeping it simple for his Why Not? Tour this fall.
The country artist announced on his website in July that although he and his team were “doing everything in our power to keep tickets in the hands of fans and out of the hands of scalpers,” they were opting out of using dynamic pricing for the 37-date run.
Although dynamic pricing is one of the concert business’ most effective tools for keeping tickets off the secondary market, it’s also a major factor in the sharp rise of ticket prices, and Simpson was taking his fans’ wallets into account.
For years, promoters put tickets on sale at a handful of price points, then watched them sell out and get listed with huge markups on the secondary market — revenue that would not accrue to them.
Since then, scalpers have hacked most efforts to foil them, including one of the strategies Simpson is employing: vetting presale buyers. The only proven deterrent has been dynamic pricing: charging what the market will bear during the initial on-sale in hopes of curbing secondary markups.
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In the early days of the music industry’s post-pandemic return to live shows, when pent-up demand led to robust sales, dynamic pricing became the go-to strategy for major acts. The move helped lead to a 30% rise in ticket prices from 2019 to 2024, however, according to Billboard Boxscore, with the average ticket price of a top 40-grossing tour jumping $111 to $144 at midyear 2024 — 6.6% in the past six months.
With the pandemic in the rearview mirror, many in the industry express concern about the sustainability of this upswing. In recent weeks, The Black Keys, Jennifer Lopez and other high-profile artists have canceled tours due to backlash over ticket prices. (The Black Keys fired their management in the aftermath.)
According to Billboard Boxscore, only a handful of acts can charge more than $200 a ticket and sell out, and yet more artists are pushing the boundaries on ticket price and quickly approaching average ticket prices between $150 to $200, getting very close to the ceiling of what fans can or will pay.
“Patronage is up — we are seeing more fans come out to shows, but our costs are eating into the increase in volume,” said Morgan Margolin, CEO of Knitting Factory Entertainment, who says agents and managers are charging 30% to 40% more for acts than they did prior to the pandemic.
“It’s getting more difficult to do business in the major markets, especially with minimum wage increases, insurance, rent, and other costs,” he added. “If artists and managers and agents keep escalating on top of those fees, where is the tipping point?”
The Black Keys successfully played U.S. arenas in the past but only a handful. Most of their dates were either festival slots or amphitheater and theater shows. In 2019, they grossed $28 million on their co-headlining Let’s Rock run with Modest Mouse. Tickets for that tour started at $36.50, with four price points under $100. For the band’s canceled International Players Tour, some tickets were priced at $59.75 and $89.75 but others were listed for $119.75, $159.75 and $199.75. In comparison, the bulk of Simpson’s tickets are selling in the $53 to $72 range.
Pricing tickets based on how much scalpers might profit is difficult and risky. If they are overpriced and the tour flops on the initial on-sale, it’s almost impossible to save. Reducing the price can alienate fans who paid the full cost. Stay the course, and if the tour is deemed a loser, fans will avoid it.
“I think a lot of these artists are getting bad advice and not thinking through the long-term consequences of chasing big bucks,” one arena booking executive says. “And that’s going to hurt them in the long run.”
A version of this story will appear in the Aug. 31, 2024 issue of Billboard.
TickPick has raised $250 million from Brighton Park Capital and golfer Rory McIlroy’s investment partnership Symphony Ventures, it was announced Thursday (Aug. 22). TickPick was founded in 2011 by co-CEOs Brett Goldberg and Chris O’Brien as an independent ticketing marketplace. Since launching, TickPick has been downloaded 14 million times and transacted more than $1 billion […]
As the nation focuses on Tim Walz, the newly named vice presidential running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, a look into his record as Minnesota’s governor reveals that he recently signed a bill designed to protect concertgoers from junk fees and fraud. This past May, Walz signed a bill that increased transparency for […]
VAI Resort, metro Phoenix’s new $1 billion hotel, culinary and live entertainment destination opening later this year, has partnered with Tixr, the privately-held primary ticketing and live event company. Tixr will exclusively ticket events and experiences for the property’s amphitheater, poolside area and nightclub.
The $50 million, 11,000-capacity VAI Amphitheater in Glendale anchors the 60-acre property with 1,100 guest rooms offering a number of views of the concert venue. From hotel room balconies, to sky boxes, VIP booths and high-end reserved seats, the property offers a number of unique vantage points to see performances. The property will also feature a dayclub, as well as regular programming at its nightclub, with Tixr powering all live event commerce.
“Everything we’re building at VAI Resort, from the property itself to the guest experience, is unique, bigger, bolder, and first-of-its-kind. That ethos is reflected in the technology partners we’ve chosen like Tixr and the innovative feature set they bring to the table,” said Howard Weiss, VAI Resort’s senior v.p. of Entertainment & Sponsorships. “After a long vetting process, there’s no question that Tixr was the right choice for us,” Weiss added, noting, “it’s a true partnership, and every day we’re reminded of why we chose them.”
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“VAI Resort is not just a world-class destination; it’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. With its diverse venues and experiences on property, each with their own tech needs, VAI is the forward-thinking kind of partner Tixr is uniquely suited for,” said Robert Davari, co-founder and CEO of Tixr. “We can power sales for the entire resort, from complex reserved seating to bottle service, hotel packages—virtually anything—which hasn’t been possible before on a single system. And we do it in an visual, elegant way that feels nothing like traditional ticketing. We’re working closely with the VAI team to bring their vision to life and can’t wait to get operational.”
Tixr powers more than 500 live entertainment brands in 40 countries. The Los Angeles-based company said that since its inception, it has processed nearly $2 billion in transactions through its unified commerce platform, designed for sales beyond admission tickets.
The beach-style resort is located near State Farm Stadium — home of the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals — and a soon-to-be completed theme park from Mattel — VAI is set to open in 2025. In February, hotel officials announced they had inked a partnership with Live Nation and C3 Presents to book the amphitheater.
Ticketmaster announced Wednesday (July 24) that the company is expanding its presence in Africa with the acquisition of Quicket, described in a press release as “a major player in Africa’s general admission event and festival ticketing.” Quicket, which was founded in South Africa in 2011, is known for its self-service platform and event organizer […]
Pressure on Congress is heating up to pass legislation that will clean up the live events ticketing business following May’s passage of the Transparency In Charges for Key Events Ticketing (TICKET) Act in the House of Representatives.
The Fix the Tix Coalition, led by the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), is calling for a nationwide day of action Tuesday (July 9) to encourage music fans, professionals and supporters to lobby their congressional representatives to pass meaningful legislation that will curb the growing problem of ticketing scams and deceptive practices in the live music business.
NIVA and other members of the Fix the Tix coalition, which also includes the Recording Academy and the National Independent Talent Organization, are backing their own legislation — the Senate’s Fans First Act, supported by U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) — while also supporting passage of the TICKET Act, which is sponsored by Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla) and Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.), among others.
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Both bills would ban the use of speculative ticket listings on sites like StubHub and SeatGeek, require all-in-pricing before checkout and crack down on the use of deceptive websites and URLs. The Fans First Act would also require resellers to disclose seat locations on their resale listings, ban scalpers from using fan clubs to buy up some concert tickets and include greater consumer protections for canceled events.
Fix The Tix officials are asking fans, artists, and members of the music and performance communities to reach out to Congress on Tuesday to demand action by the end of 2024.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the TICKET Act in a 388-24 vote on May 15. The bill is currently before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
A case study conducted by Fix The Tix across five independent venues in the Washington, D.C., area shows that in 2024, 73,000 speculative tickets totaling an estimated $49 million have been listed on resale platforms. Speculative tickets are tickets that aren’t actually available for purchase but are sold to consumers at a considerable markup by sellers who promise to procure and deliver the tickets prior to the concert. These listings can often be misleading and lead to fraud.
“The Fix the Tix Day of Action is an important moment for all of us who believe in fair and transparent ticketing,” said Stephen Parker, executive director of NIVA, in a press release. “It’s a time to elevate the voices of fans and artists and harness their power as constituents. This is more than a one-day campaign. It’s a collective cry to protect the integrity of live performance. We urge Congress to listen to the voices of fans and artists and put comprehensive ticketing reform on their list of must-pass legislation in 2024, alongside other critical legislation such as FY 2025 Appropriations and the Farm Bill.”
Information on how to contact senators, members of Congress and the White House for tomorrow’s day of action can be found at fixthetix.org.
StubHub must pay more than $16 million in legal damages after a jury decided that the ticketing giant intentionally torpedoed a smaller company’s lucrative concierge partnership with American Express.
Following a month-long trial, a Los Angeles jury on Friday (May 24) sided with Spotlight Ticket Management — a tech startup that had sued over allegations that StubHub failed to pay Spotlight millions in commissions and then used false statements to “poison” the company’s relationship with Amex.
Leading up to the trial, StubHub had argued it paid Spotlight everything that was owed and that the smaller firm had killed its Amex deal itself by being an “unreasonable partner” to the financial giant: “The true cause of Spotlight’s demise was Spotlight itself.”
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But in Friday’s verdict, the jurors found for Spotlight on both issues. They ordered StubHub to pay $3 million over the commissions; $5.3 million over money lost from the terminated Amex partnership; and another $8.1 million that they said Spotlight would have earned from Amex in the future.
StubHub did not immediately return a request for comment. Amex was not named as a defendant in the case or accused of any wrongdoing. In a statement, Spotlight called the verdict “a victory for Spotlight, for affiliate partners more broadly, and for ticket purchasers across the country.”
Launched in 2007, Spotlight offers ticketing management software to help companies provide event access to their employees or customers. One of its major clients was Amex, which used Spotlight as part of its concierge system to buy concert and sports tickets for premium cardholders.
In its lawsuit, Spotlight claimed that it had successfully partnered with StubHub for years, sending as much as $85 million in ticket sales to the company’s platform and receiving a 7% commission on those sales.
But starting in 2016, Spotlight claimed that StubHub began underpaying those commissions. And when the smaller company raised the dispute, it claimed that StubHub retaliated by tanking its relationship with Amex with false and disparaging claims.
“StubHub gave Amex an ‘ultimatum’ that it could not work with Spotlight for these reasons and Amex would lose access to StubHub’s entire ticket inventory, crushing the availability of secondary market tickets to the Amex Concierge program overnight, unless Amex got rid of Spotlight,” the company’s attorneys wrote in a pre-trial briefing.
StubHub sharply disagreed. In its own filings, the company argued that it had paid Spotlight all the commissions that it was actually owed under its affiliate program. And it said that the smaller company had “destroyed its own relationship with Amex” through “erratic behavior.”
“Spotlight has taken a modest dispute about payment of affiliate commissions and morphed it into a conspiratorial web to support its claim for hundreds of millions of dollars,” StubHub’s attorneys wrote. “Amex witnesses have testified that they decided not to renew based on Spotlight’s unreasonable demands and that StubHub had nothing to do with Amex’s decision.”
But following a three-week trial, jurors believed Spotlight’s version of events, finding StubHub liable for breach of contract over the unpaid commissions as well as intentional interference with contract and intentional interference with prospective economic relations over the Amex partnership.
StubHub can appeal the verdict, first by asking the judge to order a new trial and then by taking the case to a California appeals court.
The Maryland bill targeting speculative ticketing in the state was signed into law by Gov. Wes Moore today. The consumer protection bill focuses on the sale and resale of live event tickets and was supported by the Recording Academy, National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), National Independent Talent Organization (NITO), Eventbrite and more.
The bill bans speculative ticketing (the practice of listing tickets on secondary sites before a reseller owns a ticket), as well as require ticketers to present “all in” pricing for consumers, meaning the full price of the ticket — including all fees — must be present in the price first shown to fans. The law will go into effect on July 1.
“In addition to Senators [Dawn Danielle] Gile and [Pamela] Beidle and Delegate [C.T.] Wilson, we’re also grateful to Marylanders who spoke out and let their elected officials know that they want protection from parasitic scalpers who use acts of deception to gouge concert fans,” said Audrey Fix Schaefer, communications director of Merriweather Post Pavilion and I.M.P. in a statement. “Nearly 17,000 letters were sent by Marylanders to their state legislators, letting those in Annapolis know they want protection from the rampant deception and abuse that’s taking place now. We applaud the entire State legislature for this groundbreaking legislation, and we look forward to working with the Attorney General’s office to help ensure enforcement.”
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The bill requires resellers to provide the zone and seat number for non-general admission events, eliminating the common practice of resellers listing an unspecified seat and procuring a ticket — for a lesser price — once a consumer has purchased the “unspecified” seat from a secondary site. It also reduces resellers’ ability to list generic tickets on resale sites before on-sale for the actual event has occurred.
A standout of the bill for proponents like NIVA, NITO and others, is that the bill makes it illegal for secondary ticketing platforms to provide a marketplace for the sale or resale of tickets that violate the law. If a consumer purchases a ticket that is counterfeit, canceled by the reseller or fails to meet its original description, the secondary platform would be responsible for paying the consumer back for the total amount paid, including any fees. Platforms selling or offering to sell speculative tickets can be fined up to $10,000 for the first infraction and $25,000 for each subsequent infraction.
Additionally, the bill mandates “all-in” ticket pricing — where consumers see the full price of the ticket, including fees, from the beginning of their transaction — and require those fees to be itemized so fans know where their dollars are going. The passage of the bill also means Maryland’s attorney general’s office can conduct a review of how resellers are procuring their tickets, the price difference for fans on the primary versus secondary market, fraudulent tickets, the use of bots, what measures other states have enacted to protect consumers during the ticket buying process and more.
The AG’s study is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.