It’s a good article and Nathan does a great job diagnosing problems with the status quo – including how arbitrageurs use bots to buy tickets before real fans get the chance.
Last month, former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard published a piece on “why you can’t get a ticket to the NBA Finals.”
It’s a good article and Nathan does a great job diagnosing problems with the status quo – including how arbitrageurs use bots to buy tickets before real fans get the chance.
While I agree with Nathan that we need to solve the problem of how to get more fans to more events at a fair price, I disagree on the solution.
Hubbard proposes restricting how fans can transfer tickets, locking them down within a closed platform. This technique is called “paperless ticketing” – if you’ve ever been to a concert that demands you swipe your credit card to get in, then you’re familiar with it. The idea is that by making it harder to transfer ownership, non-fans have less incentive to buy and resell tickets.
Paperless ticketing can be effective in reducing resale activity in some cases, but with it comes substantial downsides. Restricting transferability is, at best, an uncreative half measure. It inconveniences fans who can no longer attend the event or want to send tickets to friends, and it’s a pain at the door.
Fans can receive tickets as much as ten months prior to an event…what happens when their plans (or credit card numbers) change? When paperless ticketing has been tried in the past, the only clear conclusion is that it annoys consumers.
I think there’s a better, more open way to improve the experience for everyone involved: leagues, teams, venues, and most of all, fans. And it’s not too different from what has worked in other technology categories.
But first, a quick aside…
The power of the internet lies in how it enables developers everywhere to create technology to improve lives. Open approaches – ones that start with easy-to-use software, priced transparently and fairly, and built for others to share and improve – are transforming major sectors globally, from payments (Braintree & Stripe), to hosting (AWS), to communications (Twilio), to mobile (Android).
But somehow ticketing has been left behind. It remains closed, uneaten by software. Why?
The short answer is that it’s always been a pay-to-play business.
Ticketmaster (and its parent company, Live Nation) – and a handful of competitors – have used the power of their pocketbooks for years to lock up teams, leagues, and arena owners with rigid long-term contracts that force these stakeholders to use their platforms exclusively, leaving consumers with little choice other than to accept their considerable fees.