A new approach to ticketing tech? It can be done...

A new approach to ticketing tech? It can be done...

Jack Groetzinger, co-founder of SeatGeek, wrote a very interesting guest column on "Hypebot.com", about the subject of ticketing and the need to find a new approach to fight bots, secondary ticketing and the well known problems of this industry. The solution of paperless tiocketing, even if rather effective, is not the best possibl,e since, as Groetzinger notes:

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.

The solution, for Groetzinger, is another way of thinking:

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. [...] 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.
As a result, live entertainment remains largely closed, stuck in a world of pre-internet thinking. The core API endpoints of the live event commerce experience – purchasing, delivery, transfer, fan identity, access – are locked down within legacy primary ticket vendors, and are inaccessible to developers, artists and teams. [...]
The end result? Everyone is unhappy. Fans are forced to deal with an awful checkout experience, are nickeled-and-dimed with fees at every turn, and are unable to openly transfer or sell tickets.

His solution is an open ticketing ecosystem - still to be conceived and invented, though:

What do we mean by an open ticketing ecosystem? Imagine a world where…

  • Artists and teams can sell their tickets on any website or app, whether it’s their own, Facebook Messenger, Amazon, every ticket site, or anywhere else. (In the status quo, artists and teams can only sell tickets on their ticket vendor’s site. Unlike most other ecommerce categories, they can’t leverage omnichannel distribution to sell across the web. Think about how strange that is…not even Apple, the most iconic brand in America, sells exclusively on Apple.com!)
  • Fans can, in turn, buy tickets anywhere. They can also sell or transfer tickets anytime. Can’t make it to a game last-minute and want to send your tickets to your favorite co-worker on Slack? Cool. Want to list your tickets on StubHub and reissue a new barcode to the buyer? No problem. You own the tickets. You decide what to do with them.
  • Using open APIs, enterprising software developers can write apps that improve the fan experience. Maybe a team wants to sell tickets from within Uber, bundled with an UberPOOL ride to the game? Easy to do. And Uber can further use the ticket platform API to make sure your carpool buddies are fans of the same team (it’ll make for a more fun ride!).

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE