Ticketing
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A whole generation of live music fans is being trained to expect the worst when it comes to purchasing tickets for concerts, according to National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) president Dayna Frank.
âItâs imperative to the future of live music, especially for the emerging class and the emerging artists, to be able to make buying a ticket and going to a show at even club level venues easy and simple,â Frank said at the NIVA â23 conference in Washington, D.C. âItâs devastating what weâve trained young people to expect when they go buy a ticket: how hard it is, youâve got to be online at a certain time, you might not get it, you might pay $85 when there are $25 tickets available.â
Frank was speaking on the panel âFix The Tix: How We Stop Predatory Ticketing Practices from Harming Fans and Artists,â which was held at The Anthem on July 10. Appearing alongside her was Lyte CEO Ant Taylor, who agreed with Frankâs assessment of the bleak ticket-buying process for music fans in 2023.
âThe thing that we forget about or that we frequently donât talk about is that on the other side of all this bullsâ is the fan,â said Taylor. âHow many fans arenât even coming to an onsale anymore because theyâve given up because of all the points of friction?â
Since concerts restarted following COVID-19 lockdowns, obtaining tickets for high-profile artists like Taylor Swift and BeyoncĂŠ has become a game of uncertainty and chance due to factors including bots, unscrupulous brokers and high demand from fans who have waited years to see their favorite artists. And while neither of those superstars will have their livelihoods affected by ticketing issues, smaller artists, venues and promoters in the live music ecosystem can be severely impacted, particularly by brokers who scoop up tickets and place them on the secondary market at markedly higher prices. Because fewer fans are willing to buy tickets at those higher prices, post-pandemic âno-showâ rates â or the percentage of people who buy tickets but donât attend a show â have remained frustratingly high.
âI donât know how many folks are tracking how many of their tickets are on the secondary markets the day of the show, but weâll easily see 20-30 tickets just sitting there, unsold,â said Frank, who also owns famed independent venue First Avenue in Minneapolis.
Frank stated that a common no-show rate was around 7% prior to the pandemic. Now, even though no-shows have gone down from their pandemic high, independent venues are continuing to see rates of 12-15% regularly. That means fewer bar and merch sales, which can often be the revenue that makes or breaks a show for small artists and venues.
The current state of concert ticketing in the United States was a major concern for attendees of the second annual conference that hosted independent venues, promoters, agents and ticketers from July 9-12 in the nationâs capital. The âFix the Tixâ panel focused on issues facing the ticketing industry and possible solutions â many of which can be found in the Fix the Tix Act NIVA is lobbying for the federal government to pass. The legislation would ban the sale of speculative tickets (tickets that brokers donât have in their possession) and the use of bots, as well as require up front pricing and caps on resale prices while providing funds for enforcement.
âThe Fix the Tix proposal says that promoters and artists should be able to put terms and conditions on the tickets as they transfer hands,â said Frank, who added that brokers have been lobbying the federal government to make non-transferable tickets illegal for well over a decade. The brokersâ argument, according to Frank, is that they own a ticket and have the right to do anything they want with it â but live music professionals believe the ticket is actually a license, she says.
âThat ticket can change hands 25 times, but ultimately the product is the show that weâre responsible for,â Frank continued. âAs the people responsible for the product, we should be able to have terms and conditions on this licenseâŚOur product involves people coming into our houses which we are legally responsible for. We have to have oversight of how those tickets are transferred.â
Fellow panelist Frank Riley of High Road Touring agreed. âThe only way to put this genie back in the bottle is to regain control of whoâs in charge of the ticket, and thatâs been the artist and the promoter,â said Riley. âAny other solution thatâs out there will not work.â
Riley said that putting a cap on how much a ticket can be resold for would be a major hit to brokers on the secondary market. âIf you eliminate the profit motive out of the secondary market [as we know it], it will disappear,â he said.
As NIVA, the National Independent Talent Organization, Universal Music Group and many other music industry entities who have signed on to the Fix the Tix legislation are fighting for federal regulation over ticketing, University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor of economics and entrepreneurship Eric Budish suggested that transparency about where the funds go could bolster those efforts.
âCongress or somebody else should figure out who made how much money on the Taylor Swift tour. Taylor Swift made a lot of money and good for her,â Budish said. âBut if a ticket got resold for $2,000, thereâs 35% fees on that, give or take, so the resale platform probably made more on that ticket than Taylor Swift did. The broker made more money on that ticket than Taylor Swift did. The search engines made a bunch of money in aggregate on those tickets. Iâd love to see that money added up. I think that could be really persuasive to a large number of consumers.â
Another approach to tackling the issue came from panelist Neeta Ragoowansi, executive director of Folk Alliance International and president of Music Managers Forum in the United States. Ragoowansi explained that selling fake tickets or listing tickets that a seller does not actually own constitutes copyright infringement, since the seller is using the name of an artist and/or venue to sell an item without permission. She suggested taking legal action against brokers or search engines who are allowing them to operate these illegal practices, similar to how the National Music Publishersâ Association filed suit against Twitter for copyright infringement over its failure to license music.
Naming NIVA, NITO, Music Managers Forum and the Recording Academy, Ragoowansi said, âThereâs a variety of interested parties that have members who have standing to file suit there. File suit on mass, class action or even just 15-20 parties who have a variety of causes of action.â
A class action against the brokers or search engines could make substantial headlines, says Ragoowansi, adding it would âallow for the parties to come to the table and start talking about settlement and creating a precedent so that others donât come in.â
Ticketmaster owner Live Nationâs push for legislative ticketing reform earlier this year has actually slowed down progress on those issues, sources tell Billboard, stalling a long-in-the-works bill that addresses nearly identical concerns about the ticketing business.
Last year, even before Taylor Swiftâs Eras Tour presale fiasco inspired a flurry of ticketing reform bills, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) had been working on a wide-reaching piece of legislation in cooperation with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) to âcombat predatory and deceptive ticketing practices,â according to sources close to the issue. The bill included bans on deceptive practices and speculative listings, enforcement of existing anti-bot laws and new tools for countering ticketing fraud. Its most substantive change took aim at the secondary ticketing industry, granting artists and tour promoters sweeping power to reduce ticket scalping by allowing artists to set legally binding rules on how and where their tickets are resold, according to a November 2022 memo reviewed by Billboard. Besides NIVA, Universal Music Group, Wasserman Music, Dice and See Tickets were all among the broad coalition of music companies supporting the effort under the coalition name Fix the Tix.
But, for months, the bill has languished â even as attention around ticketing has grown considerably following a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January on competition within the ticketing industry. Thatâs because of increased lobbying by pro-scalper groups and a decision in February, by Ticketmaster owner Live Nation, to unveil the FAIR Ticketing Act, a five-point proposal with a list of legislative fixes â and the recommendations were very similar to the fixes NIVA had been quietly lobbying for.
With NIVA representing thousands of independent venues and Live Nation representing its huge corporate portfolio, the two entities often have opposing agendas, and some NIVA members theorized that Live Nation was attempting to sabotage their bill. Worried that supporting a similar proposal would look like politicians were rewarding Ticketmaster at a time when outrage at the company was growing, momentum around the NIVA bill waned. Klobucharâs office, which had planned to announce a bi-partisan bill with Cornyn in the spring, delayed its announcement amid new concerns that the bill might strengthen Ticketmaster, sources close to both Live Nation and NIVA tell Billboard. They add that the FAIR Ticketing Act was neither a clone of the proposed NIVA bill nor a poison pill.
âLive Nation and Ticketmaster have been the target of the Senate since the two companies merged in 2010,â says one NIVA member speaking on the condition of anonymity. âThereâs an appetite in D.C. to punish Ticketmaster, but the reality is that thereâs no way to pass a law that would both punish Ticketmaster and bring about the types of reforms needed to clean up the ticketing business.â
Case in point: On April 28, Klobucharâs office introduced legislation with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that would have banned ticketing companies like Ticketmaster from signing venue clients to long-term exclusive contracts. The proposal has faced opposition from some members of NIVA, who argued it would hurt small venues that relied on the payments from those contracts, and that fans would likely have to make up for the loss through higher ticket prices. A representative for Live Nation previously told Billboard the proposal wouldnât âhave a material impact on our business as we historically add clients in competitive marketplaces.â
As for similarities between the NIVA-backed bill and Live Nationâs proposal, âItâs not surprising that the two groups that spent the last six months thinking about legislative fixes [to] the same issue came up with similar solutions,â said one source close to Live Nation, noting that much of the friction between NIVA and Ticketmaster has subsided.
Ticketmaster officials appear to have gotten the message and have toned down the rhetoric around their political efforts. Many of the campaign efforts have been picked up by NIVA, which successfully lobbied for $15 billion in federal aid for venues negatively impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2021. Now, sources say, the Fix the Tix bill is expected to be proposed in the next couple of weeks. Â
Leading the charge at NIVA is the organizationâs executive director, Stephen Parker. A longtime D.C. insider who worked with Sen. Tim Kaine when he was the governor of Virginia, Parker spent a decade at the bipartisan National Governors Association and has served on the board of the Country Music Association.
Parker confirmed to Billboard that neither Live Nation nor Ticketmaster has signed on as official supporters of the Fix the Tix coalition, while he and others are being extra cautious not to make their legislative package a referendum on Ticketmaster. Still, the Live Nation-owned company will play an outsized role in the Fix the Tix plan, as opponents are getting ready to paint the proposal as a major power shift to Ticketmaster and away from scalpers.
The Fix the Tix proposal would âmake it illegal for resellers, professional ticket brokers, and ticket platforms to violate the artistsâ and venuesâ ticket terms and conditions, including restrictions that prohibit price gouging of fans through the resale of tickets above face value,â according to an early draft obtained by Billboard. That means artists, venues, or promoters could place ceilings on how much tickets are allowed to be marked up or restrict ticket resale until after all primary tickets have been sold. Since Ticketmaster and AEG are the only two companies on the market with technology that can track tickets after theyâre sold to see if they are being resold and for how much, however, critics say this sort of law would create an even greater dependence on their services.
Thatâs far more power than Ticketmaster should have, says John Breyault, vp of public policy at the National Consumers League and a founding board member of the Fan Freedom Project, an advocacy group fighting restrictions on resale that receives funding from StubHub and Vivid Seats. âTicketmaster does not want to eliminate resale; they want to control resale,â Breyault says. The current proposals by Ticketmaster and NIVA could bankrupt major secondary resale sites, especially if most tours decided to make their tickets non-transferable. Once Live Nation âgot rid of its competitors,â Breyault says the company could convince the artist it works with to lighten up on ticket transferability and effectively âown the resale market.â
To a degree, Fix the Tix is a response to the dozens of pieces of pro-scalping legislation and lobbying that have been proposed at the state and federal levels over the past six months. This Fix the Tix bill would seek to overrule any state-level legislation that exists; there are currently over a dozen states with laws that outlaw restrictions on ticket transferability, meaning anyone can resell tickets at any price they want.Others, like Rep. Bill Pascrellâs (D-NJ) BOSS and SWIFT Act â which Breyault supports and the Fix the Tix coalition opposes â would permanently legalize scalping by making it illegal for ticketing companies to restrict ticket transferability.
Last year, the American Economic Liberties Project, which is funded by Pierre Omidyar â former chairman of eBay and owner of Ticketmaster rival StubHub â announced the âBreak Up Ticketmaster,â campaign, aimed at pressuring the DOJ âto investigate and unwind the 2010 Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger,â according to the groupâs website.
Opponents of scalping say the BOSS Act would make it impossible for artists to keep their tickets off secondary sites and would allow all scalping sites to sell any tickets they wanted without restriction. Proponents, however, believe that outcome is better for fans than allowing Live Nation and the artists it works with to make these decisions.
While the scalpers and the concert promoters are far apart on most issues, the rival bills do share consensus on a number of practices in ticketing that have long drawn the ire of fans. Those include speculative ticket listing, drip pricing and misleading marketing campaigns â all of which would be banned by both NIVAâs proposal and the BOSS and Swift Act.
Editorâs note: Billboard has updated this story to more accurately describe the work performed by the American Economic Liberties Project.
President Joe Biden announced a major accomplishment in his battle against ticketing junk fees Thursday (June 15), but the impact is likely to be minimal.
After meeting with executives at Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and Dice, among others, those companies agreed to adopt all-in ticket pricing for their sales. For Ticketmaster, that will specifically impact shows at the more than 250 venues owned by parent company Live Nation in the United States â not all its ticketing clients.
The companiesâ commitments to all-in pricing are part of a larger effort under the Biden administration and the Federal Trade Commission to reign in billions of dollars in junk fees charged to consumers by banks, hotel companies and entertainment groups. And while the buy-in from some of the worldâs largest ticketing companies is an important milestone, the voluntary change will likely only impact a small percentage of tickets and give ticket sellers who conceal add-on fees to consumers until the end of the checkout process a competitive advantage over firms who display the full price at checkout.
The limited impact of Thursdayâs announcement underscores the challenges lawmakers face as they attempt to come up with legislative fixes for the ticketing industry in the wake of disruptions to Taylor Swiftâs high profile Eras tour. While politicians like Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) have pointed the finger at Ticketmasterâs dominant market share, a growing coalition of music industry insiders under the #FixTheTix banner have blamed scalpers for the disruptions to the Taylor Swift sale and continued bot attacks on the ticketing industry.
While much of the battle between Ticketmaster and secondary sites like Stubhub and SeatGeek comes down to fundamental disagreements over artistsâ rights to control their tickets and consumersâ rights to buy and sell tickets at whatever price the market will bear, the elimination of last minute fees added to tickets at checkout â sometimes as high as 25% to 35% of the face value of the ticket â had support from both primary and secondary ticket sellers.
In order for the all-in pricing to work, however, most experts agree that it must be mandated by law. Otherwise, many ticketing companies, sports teams and venues are unlikely to voluntarily change their pricing policy out of concern it could be a competitive disadvantage for their facility.
Even Thursdayâs commitment from Ticketmaster has no impact on the hundreds of sports venues that sell millions of tickets to games and concerts each year. Thatâs because Ticketmaster cannot force teams within National Hockey League, National Basketball Association and National Football League to adopt all-in pricing at their stadiums and arenas, despite holding the exclusive ticketing rights to approximately 80% of the teams within those three leagues.
The same goes for the hundreds of independently owned venues for which Ticketmaster provides ticketing services.
Looking at the top 40 venues on Billboardâs midyear Boxscore charts, while most are ticketed by Ticketmaster, none are owned by parent company Live Nation and none of the facilities will initially offer all-in pricing on their websites or ticket sales pages under the new commitment. The same goes for the hundreds of tours Live Nation promotes as well. Thatâs because standard ticketing contracts allow venues â and not Ticketmaster or other ticketing companies â to decide how tickets are sold, how much money in fees is added to a ticket, and how and when the breakdown between face value and add-ons like facility fees are displayed to consumers.
Studies show that ticketing companies that donât use all in pricing have a competitive advantage over companies that show the full price of a ticket upfront. A consumer study by Stubhub in the 2010s shown that fans were more likely to purchase a ticket, even if it had a higher checkout price, if the initial price they were shown was lower than comparable tickets on other websites prices
âLive Nationâs promise today to give Americans price transparency at their venues is encouraging, but we need all-in pricing at all venues, for all live events, and on all ticket selling services now,â Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) wrote in an email to Billboard, noting his bill, the BOSS and SWIFT ACT legislation would âmandate in law all-in pricing for true transparency.â
âNot until every seller offers all-in pricing can consumers get the comparison shopping experience for tickets that they deserve,â he wrote.
Critics of the BOSS and SWIFT ACT argue that while the legislation does improve transparency, it includes protections for ticket scalpers that would make it impossible for artists to protect their concert tickets from price gauging.
âLive Nation is proud to provide fans with a better ticketing buying experience,â said Tom See, president of Live Nationâs Venue Nation, in a statement. âWe have thousands of crew working behind the scenes every day to help artists share their music live with fans, and weâll continue advocating for innovations and reforms that protect that amazing connection.â
Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, told Billboard in an email, âUp-front pricing should be the start of comprehensive ticketing reform that protects consumers from price gouging and deceptive practices by predatory resellers.â
âWe applaud the President for todayâs meeting and look forward to working with his Administration and Congress to make comprehensive, bipartisan ticketing reform a reality,â Parker continued.
The National Independent Talent Organization, a group representing independent talent booking agents, applauded the voluntary change at Ticketmaster, but noted the change was âan important first step.â
âUntil Congress acts to eliminate excessive fees and secondary ticketing is carefully regulated,â the organization said in a statement, âmillions of consumers will still be the victim of predatory ticketing practices.â
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and many liberal Democrats have two things in common, and perhaps only two: They hate the way concert and sports ticket sales work â specifically the company selling most of them, Ticketmaster â and they love Taylor Swift. Or, at least, they acknowledge that ingratiating themselves to Swiftâs fan army as she sells out stadiums in their states is an efficient way to build up constituent support.Â
Over the past couple of months, Cruz, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Massachusetts Sen. John Velis (D-Hampden and Hampshire) and others have presented a variety of bills intended to reform the ticket-selling business, invoking Swift and fansâ displeasure with Ticketmasterâs Eras Tour on-sale fiasco in November, when more than 100,000 fans were kicked out of the online sale queue. Following a Senate subcommittee hearing focused on Ticketmaster in January, politicians clearly see positioning themselves against the ticketing giant and attaching themselves to Swiftâs millions of passionate fans as a winning combination. Theyâre even naming their bills after her.Â
âThereâs a growing awareness of the problem, and the Taylor Swift concert debacle played a part in focusing a lot of attention on the issue,â Cruz tells Billboard, adding that his 12-year-old daughter recently attended an Eras Tour show.
That debacle, Ticketmaster declared at the time, was due to unprecedented levels of illegal bots attacking the online sale. But that claim did little to satisfy fans and politicians, who during a January Senate hearing instead chose to focus on monopolistic behavior by Ticketmaster and its owner, promoter Live Nation, often referencing Swift lyrics between swipes at the company. Since then, the rhetoric has changed slightly. While politicians continue to scrutinize the concert giant â Klobuchar says the Department of Justice is investigating Live Nation and Ticketmaster for possible violations of their 2010 consent decree â senators and congresspeople at federal and state levels are proposing solutions to potentially more manageable issues.
In Massachusetts, Velis and his co-sponsor, Rep. Dan Carey (D-Easthampton), have introduced what they nicknamed the âTaylor Swift bill,â which aims to abolish hidden ticket fees and require sellers such as Ticketmaster and SeatGeek to disclose service charges and costs upfront. A similar law already exists in New York state, and Live Nation actually supports the issue â including it in the companyâs own proposed legislation outline. âTaylor Swift obviously sells out every concert,â Velis says, âbut sheâs also got this support ecosystem that lends itself to, âIf you want to do something about this, why not use something thatâs absolutely going to get the publicâs attention?’â
But at a time when opposing Ticketmaster is good politics, one source in touring suggested politicians do not want to be seen aligning with the corporate giant. That political strategy may even be holding back legislation on other subjects where thereâs popular consensus. Other bills, like the one Klobuchar and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced in April, limit exclusive deals with venues and therefore more directly target Ticketmaster.
Velis said he and Carey plan to meet with Ticketmaster executives in the coming weeks to discuss their bill. âThe more you can firm up a piece of legislation to get rid of unintended consequences, youâre better off,â Velis says. âThat being said, as it relates to just telling a consumer, âThis is what youâre going to spend if you want to go to this concertâ â I canât think of anything remotely close to approaching how someone can convince me thatâs not a good idea.â
To help wade through the many different pro-Swift, Ticketmaster-targeting bills out there, hereâs a rundown of what they each intend to achieve â and what each legislator gets out of sponsoring them:
Unlocking Tickets Markets Act, in the U.S. Senate
WASHINGTON (AP) â President Joe Biden is hosting executives from Live Nation, Airbnb and other companies at the White House on Thursday to highlight his administrationâs push to end so-called junk fees that surprise consumers. Biden prioritized the effort to combat surprise or undisclosed fees in his State of the Union address and has called […]
German television personality Jan BĂśhmermann appears to have single-handedly knocked more than 1 billion euros ($1.15 billion) from the market value of CTS Eventim after he criticized the concert promoter and ticketing company on his late-night talk show ZDF Magazin Royale on German public television on Friday.
According to various media reports, BĂśhmermann, in a 23-minute news-styled feature, bemoaned the companyâs dominant market position in promotion and ticketing and a lack of transparency about the fees added to tickets. âEventim is practically the German event industry,â the satirist said (as translated to English) He singled out the companyâs re-sale platform, fanSale, which allows ticket holders to sell tickets at a premium to their face values. âWhy fight the black market when you can earn money yourself?â he asked.
BĂśhmermann also said that CTS Eventim received 15 million euros ($16 million) of COVID-19 economic aid from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. In total, the company received 272 million euros ($295 million) in economic aid from Germany and elsewhere from 2020 to 2022, according to the companyâs financial statements. He noted that a director, Juliane Schulenberg, is the daughter of CTS Eventim founder and chairman Klaus-Peter Schulenberg. She has been a member of the CTS Eventimâs supervisory board since May 2016, according to the companyâs website.
âUnfortunately, many facts are twisted and not the truth,â a CTS Eventim spokesperson told Billboard in an email. While BĂśhmermann suggested Juliane Schulenberg influenced COVID-19 aid received by CTS Eventim, the companyâs spokesperson says she âhad no professional position in this regard and therefore no influence.â
ZDF Magazin Royale made a significant impact when the market opened after the weekend. Shares of CTS Eventim fell 8.9% on Monday and another 7.5% on Tuesday, bringing the two-day decline to 15.7% â a 1.07 billion euros ($1.15 billion) decline in market capitalization. After a 0.8% gain on Wednesday, shares of CTS Eventim were up 1.3% year to date.
CTS Eventim is the largest concert promotion and ticketing company in Europe and had revenues of 1.9 billion euros ($2 billion) and sold 69 million tickets online in 2022. Its portfolio includes EDM promoter ALDA Germany; the Rock am Ring and Rock im Park festivals; numerous ticketing brands; EMC Presents, a partnership with U.S. tour promoter and producer Michael Cohl; and Eventim Live Asia, a partnership with former Live Nation executive Jason Miller based in Singapore.
U.S. audiences will recall a similar segment about the countryâs dominant ticketing company, Ticketmaster, by comedian John Oliver on his HBO show Last Week Tonight in 2022. Oliver touched on the same themes brought up by BĂśhmermann: market dominance, rising ticket fees and ownership of a secondary market that profits from in-demand ticketsâ re-sale values. Oliver had a negligible effect, however, as the share price of Ticketmasterâs parent company, Live Nation, dropped just 0.5% the day after the episode aired. A chance of government intervention has given Live Nation investors pause on numerous occasions, however, such as politiciansâ criticism of Ticketmasterâs Taylor Swift pre-sale in November and a 2018 New York Times article about Live Nationâs alleged anticompetitive business practices.
Just as Live Nation and Ticketmaster are under constant scrutiny in the U.S., CTS Eventim routinely falls into the crosshairs of consumer advocates and government regulators. In February, more than 1,500 consumers in Germany had joined a model declaratory judgment against CTS Eventim filed by the Federation of German Consumer Organizations. The consumer advocacy group alleges the company did not refund ticketing fees for cancelled events. In 2018, CTS Eventimâs share price fell as much as 10% after Germanyâs Federal Supreme Court ruled the fees charged for printing out tickets ordered online were illegal. Also in 2018, the German Federal Cartel Office banned CTS Eventim from having exclusive ticketing agreements with promoters and box offices. In 2017, the Cartel Office blocked CTS Eventim from acquiring promoter and booking agency Four Artists, which a German court upheld the following year.
BRISBANE, Australia â Twenty years after its launch in a red-hot entertainment market, Oztix, Australiaâs biggest independent ticketer, just got bigger with the acquisition of Local Tickets.
With immediate effect, Local Tickets, a smaller, rival ticketing agency specializing in local events across the country, is rebranded to Localtix. And as part of the arrangement, all Local Tickets employees join its new parent, while founder and CEO Kristen Goldup is appointed as brand director across Oztix and Localtix.
Also, Oztix events will be populated across 70 local ticket marketplaces, expanding the marketing potential for events ticketed by Oztix.
âOur brands and product offerings are entirely complementary, and after just one meeting with Oztix, it was clear that we had great synergy and shared a mutual culture of putting our clients first,â comments Goldup, who founded the agency in 2011. âMy Local Tickets clients will benefit greatly from access to a new collaborative platform, and even more eyeballs will be on our local tickets marketplace websites with Oztix events being listedâ.
Financial terms of the deal werenât disclosed.
Currently, Oztix handles ticketing for venues, festivals and expos such as Big Red Bash, Crafted Beer & Cider Festival, Good Things Festival, and Summernats, while the new addition to its ranks works across a range of agricultural shows, rodeos, turf clubs, hospitality events and more.
Oztix presented its new family members with a celebratory lunch Tuesday (June 6) at its Woolloongabba headquarters, close to Brisbaneâs Gabba stadium and timed to coincide with the annual Queensland Day.
âAt any given time,â Oztix commercial director Seth Clancy told industry guests, âthe business boasts 4,000 events on sale across the country across both platforms.â Prior to the acquisition, Oztix sold close to 3 million tickets each year.
Now, the enlarged group employs 50 full-time staff and hundreds of casual staff at events around the country, notes Oztix co-founder Stuart Field. Each year, millions are pumped into technology and innovation, he explained, a sometimes painful but essential outlay âto evolve with the way technology is changing.â
Co-founder Brian âSmashâ Chladil recounted the businessâ first steps, starting out under his house in Toowong, in Brisbaneâs inner west, and landing contracts with mega-festivals Big Day Out, Soundwave and Falls.
âThe next 20 years are looking great,â he explains, âweâre growing because our clients are growing, weâre growing because we win new business and mainly because we donât lose business.â
Guests at Oztixâs âlaunch and lunchâ included QMusic president Natalie Strijland and CEO Kris Stewart; Fortitude Music Hall and The Triffid venue director John âJCâ Collins, former bass player with Powderfinger; Vicki Gordon, founding executive producer and program director of the Australian Women in Music Awards (AWMA); and Shane King, state member of parliament for Kurwongbah.
Australiaâs ticketing industry is dominated by the big two, Live Nation affiliate Ticketmaster, and TEG-owned Ticketek. Oztix expands as a new player arrives on these shores in AEG-owned ticketer AXS, led by venue management professional and former Gold Cost Suns chief Andrew Travis as CEO of AXS Australia and New Zealand.
As 2023 heads into summer, multiple signs point to a healthy and growing live music business for the rest of the year. In recent weeks, executives from the publicly traded concert promotion and ticketing companies have signaled that surging consumer demand wonât slow down, and there will be enough tours to satiate music fansâ appetite for live events.
Demand has been strong âand is showing no signs of letting up,â said Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino during the companyâs May 4 earnings call. Live Nation expects to sell more than 600 million tickets in 2023, up from 550 million in 2022. To date, the concert promoter has sold more than 100 million tickets to Live Nation events, a 20% increase from the prior-year period, and expects to host a record number of fans in 2023.
Vivid Seats, the publicly traded secondary ticketing marketplace, shares Live Nationâs sentiment. âConsumers continued to crave live experiences in the first quarter,â said CEO Stan Chia during a May 9 earnings call, âand we believe this trend will continue for many years.â Vivid Seats does business primarily in the U.S. while German promoter and ticketing provider CTS Eventim focuses on Europe. âBoth in Germany and internationally, we are pursuing organic growth and anticipate that our business performance will continue on its successful course,â said CTS Eventim CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg in the quarterly results released May 24 that reiterated the positive outlook in its 2022 annual report of âmoderately higher earningsâ for the live entertainment segment 2023.
The concert business is meeting â and perhaps surpassing â some lofty expectations. In 2022, as the concert business exited the pandemic, the widespread belief was that pent-up demand for in-person experiences would drive the concert business beyond pre-pandemic levels. That turned out to be true. Concert promoter Live Nation posted record revenue of $6.2 billion in the third quarter that was 67% above the same period in 2019. Whatâs more, the volume of fans returning to concert venues was augmented by an unmatched willingness to absorb higher prices. Frenzied demand â and sky-high prices on the secondary market â for tours by Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen have showed A-list artists have yet to find their ceiling on prices.
Concert promoters have posted strong quarterly earnings that fit their narratives. Live Nationâs first-quarter revenue was up 71% to $3.1 billion. CTS Eventimâs online ticket sales increased 58% to 18 million as consolidated revenue improved 163% to 366.2 million euros ($393 million). At Vivid Seats, which also does business in major sports such as baseball and basketball, first quarter revenue grew 23.2% to $161 million and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization doubled to $42.4 million.
Investors absorb past earnings history while figuring out what to expect in the future, and according to JP Morgan analyst David Karnovky they often ask two questions about Live Nation: First, is there enough supply to meet growing, healthy demand? Yes, Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold said at JP Morganâs Global Technology, Media and Communications conference on Tuesday. Thatâs because global streaming platforms such as Spotify and social media apps like Instagram and TikTok allow artists to build global followings in ways that werenât previously possible, he explained. K-pop and other up-and-coming genres of music âthat maybe once were regional are now going global,â he said, and artists that used to sell out mid-sized venues are now selling out stadiums. âSo, youâre seeing that supply continue to build.â
The second thing investors want to know is how demand will respond during a softer economy. Live Nation closely follows the indicators â such as on-sales show closings â Berchtold said, âbut weâre not seeing anything that gives us pause.â Separately, Berchtold noted that Live Nationâs research indicates getting back to concerts are one of fansâ top priorities after the pandemic and will be âone of the last things theyâre going to cut back on.â
Vivid Seats CFO Lawrence Fey also addressed the possibility of an economic downturn â a scenario becoming increasingly likely in the U.S. should Congress fail to find a compromise to raise the debt ceiling by early June. â[T]hereâs a lot of chatter and concern out thereâ that demand will weaken âin the not-too-distant future,â said Fey, âbut it continues to be the case that weâre seeing very robust demand across our event categories [and] across price points.â Beyond the consistently strong demand, Vivid Seats has âbeen pleasantly surprised by the supply calendar,â particularly a concert schedule that includes recently announced tours by Drake and Aerosmith, he added, âand [that] gives us optimism.â
Fans buying tickets to upcoming Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul tours now have easy access to custom messages from the RZA, the GZA and other members of each outfit via a new partnership between Ticketmaster and HiNOTE. The ticketing giant has partnered with the platform, which allows fans to request custom videos from artists […]
SeatGeek executives were scrambling to recover from an unforced error earlier this month when two discount codes leaked on social media granting users $500 discounts on the secondary ticketing marketplace. After about a half-hour of frenzied buying, the ticket resale site was forced to cancel thousands of sales and cover costs incurred by untold numbers of brokers.
The source of those troublesome codes? SeatGeek created the codes for a business conference for Major League Baseball box office managers and ticketing staff, sources tell Billboard â three months after SeatGeek signed a reported $100 million, five-year deal to take over from rival StubHub as the leagueâs official ticket reseller.
The $500 discount codes â âMLB1â and âMLB2â â were originally given out as prizes for a team building exercise during the event on May 3 at Globe Life Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home to the Texas Rangers. Known to most in the sports ticketing industry as the Baseball Ticketing and Marketing Meetings, the summit is a typically low key affair where baseball ticketing staff come together to network, share ideas and meet with league vendors. SeatGeek representatives were present at the meeting to discuss their new agreement with the league, according to multiple sources. The two discount codes did not include any expiration date or limit on how many times they could be used.
Nine days after the summit, the codes leaked onto the internet and quickly spread across social media. The first instance of the code sharing on Twitter on May 12 at 11:29 p.m. EST appears to have come from an account linked to a sports gambler named Drew Morgan, writing, âI just got 2 tickets to 2 different Steelers games 100% free on SeatGeek. Sounds too good to be true but there was zero catch at all.â
Holy shit I just got 2 tickets to 2 different Steelers games 100% free on Seat Geek. Sounds too good to be true but there was zero catch at all đ¤ŻUse codes MLB1 or MLB2 for a $500 discount on the tickets. I have no incentive at all to promote this. My friend told me about⌠pic.twitter.com/8G6ELGHPknâ Drew Morgan (@DMProps) May 13, 2023
Three minutes later, an account calling itself âLord Restockâ with 168,000 followers posted the codes, kicking off a frenzy of fans using the codes to buy tickets to sporting events, SZA concerts and more.
Around midnight, SeatGeek staff noticed the frenzied use of the $500 discount code and took the SeatGeek site offline to investigate what was happening. The site remained offline for several hours before the issue with the codes was identified and the codes were deactivated.
A SeatGeek spokesperson declined to comment on specifics about the code leaks, but told Billboard in a statement, âLast week, some fans made purchases on our site using an ineligible promo code that was wrongfully distributed without authorization. Tickets acquired via these purchases are not valid and we are working to resolve each situation accordingly.â
Officials with Major League Baseball did not respond to Billboardâs inquiries about the SeatGeek ticket codes and how they leaked online.
In the days following, SeatGeek staff began contacting ticket sellers on the site, laying out plans to cancel any transactions that used the leaked discount codes, refund any money that was spent in transactions using the codes and claw back any tickets possible before they reached fans.
âAt this stage, we have been able to contain the impact to SeatGeek, but that came at the cost of an operational burden that you have all helped us to shoulder,â company co-founder Russ DâSouza wrote in an email to ticket broker Randall Smith, CEO of Americaâs Top Tix, and obtained by Billboard.
SeatGeek operates as both a primary ticketing site for a number of sports teams, as well as a massive secondary ticketing site where tens of thousands of brokers list tickets for resale for concerts, sporting events and festivals. The company implemented a triage system to respond to the code leak, where sales made for teams that use the SeatGeek ticketing system could easily be canceled and reversed. Sales for tickets that havenât been delivered yet will also be canceled.
Tickets originally issued by rival companies like Ticketmaster, however, were more difficult to claw back. While Ticketmaster technology does allow resellers to digitally transfer tickets from seller to buyer â a process SeatGeek can automate to occur immediately after a sale on its site is made â it canât transfer the ticket back to the seller if an error is discovered. Because of this, SeatGeek is now covering any losses incurred by brokers who now must reselling tickets issued by Ticketmaster and other services.
As a result, dozens and maybe hundreds of fans who received Ticketmaster-issued tickets using the SeatGeek discount code are now in possession of tickets that canât be canceled. Since the code was discovered and taken down, many of these fans have taken to Twitter asking other fans if they think the tickets are still valid.
Brokers on the site are also angry, saying SeatGeek took too long to respond to the crisis and should have to pay the same 100% fine it charges its own sellers when customer service mistakes are made.
âIf a broker makes an error and cancels an order, they are penalized. If the exchange that dings you makes an error, they unilaterally effectuate a mutual cancelation without consent of the broker,â one reseller wrote on a forum for brokers. âIt is a totally one-sided relationship, and I really hope customers, brokers, or both bring a well-deserved class action against SG.â
SeatGeek is the second largest ticket resale site in the United States and last year raised $238 million in Series E funding. A recently abandoned effort to take the company public valued it at $1.35 billion.