The problem has so many facets it's hard to count. Where to start?
a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they lose smaller venues).
b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's vertical.
c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for tickets to be used at the agent.
It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD. It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee.
The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know how much is going to the box office settlement.
I think the place for a great disruptive startup would be at the promoter level. It's not something that you can just throw a lot of tech at, but at this point LN seems a lot more disruptable than TM.
Comments
The problem has so many facets it's hard to count. Where to start?
a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they lose smaller venues).
b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's vertical.
c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for tickets to be used at the agent.
It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD. It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee.
The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know how much is going to the box office settlement.
I think the place for a great disruptive startup would be at the promoter level. It's not something that you can just throw a lot of tech at, but at this point LN seems a lot more disruptable than TM.