A deep-dive into ticketing platforms

I’m excited to share the third member-exclusive database with you: a list of over 60 ticketing platforms around the world.

One of the first essays I’ll be publishing in my newsletter in 2020 will be about the challenges of starting a new ticketing company in the current music-industry landscape. As part of my research process, I’ve compiled a list of dozens of ticketing companies into a database that can be sorted by founding year, headquarter city, key product features, geographic market focus (if any), ticket types (primary and/or secondary) and other variables.

You can access the database below, and/or read on for some background and initial takeaways.

Context

Why am I writing this piece? There are three separate but related reasons:

1. In the past few weeks alone, there have been several major financial transactions and investigations involving some of the ticketing landscape’s biggest players.

eBay sold StubHub to Viagogo for over $4 billion in late November 2019, while the U.S. Department of Justice is currently investigating Live Nation over potential anti-competitive behavior — including their interest in acquiring a ticketing rival, aptly named Rival.

2. A layer below these mega-conglomerates, I’ve noticed a flurry of new funding announcements and entrepreneurial activity around ticketing startups over the past year, such as from TodayTix, Lyte, Festicket and the Chainsmokers-backed YellowHeart.

But to date, I’ve found virtually no pieces of analysis that tried to make sense of why this activity was happening, and what it meant for the events business at large.

In particular, Ticketmaster/Live Nation and AXS/AEG still hold a quasi-monopoly over the global ticketing market, making it a potentially challenging landscape for founders to navigate, let alone grow. I’ve already spoken with some founders about their experiences building new ticketing companies from scratch over the past few years, and look forward to sharing their insights with you next month.

3. In general, I’m hoping to write more articles about live music next year.

Concerts and tours are essential elements of artists’ careers, and comprise a multibillion-dollar business that earns more revenue annually than recorded music — yet the live sector is often dismissed or forgotten in conversations about the “music industry” behind the scenes.

Case in point: I largely neglected the topic of live events in 2019, in favor of pieces about streaming, music startups, digital media and online fan-engagement platforms. Hopefully this piece will be a helpful launching point for filling that gap in my future writing.

A few disclaimers

The database below is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all ticketing platforms founded throughout history. It admittedly has a built-in recency bias, with a focus on currently-active ticketing platforms founded in the 2010s.

That said, I will be updating the database in the coming weeks as I continue my research, so if you think there are any important companies that are missing, please let me know!

This database also does not include companies focused on event discovery, such as Bandsintown, Songkick or TicketIQ;  nor does it include companies focused on ticketing for events or activities beyond live performance (e.g. flights, films).

Initial Takeaways

1. At least 16 new ticketing startups were launched between 2016 and 2019 — over half of which were founded in the U.S.

That’s quite a lot of companies, given how concentrated the global ticketing market is in only a handful of players. Only a few of them have been acquired in that time period, such as blockchain-powered platform Upgraded, which Ticketmaster acquired in October 2018.

Speaking of blockchain…

2. Nearly half of the new ticketing platforms founded over the past three years incorporate blockchain, for the purposes of curbing fraud and streamlining secondary-market transactions.

This is an indication less of whether blockchain is actually the next step for ticketing, and more of the stubborn problems that still exist in the ticketing industry at large: identity fraud/theft, and secondary-market dynamics that often seem unethical or have no upside for artists, promoters and/or venues.

One challenge I’ll be exploring in my piece, though, is the fact that at least in the U.S., the ticketing industry is dominated by those companies who have the most capital to strike exclusive, long-term relationships with venues — not necessarily those that build the best or most advanced products. What does this mean for founders in the space who are naturally so product-driven from the outset?

3. In the U.S., ticketing companies are concentrated in San Francisco and New York, not in Los Angeles.

The two biggest ticketing platforms in the world, Ticketmaster and AXS, are headquartered in Los Angeles because their parent companies (Live Nation and AEG, respectively) are also there.

But aside from those two, the vast majority of ticketing companies in the U.S. are not located in the heart of the entertainment business. Instead, they’re in San Francisco (e.g. Eventbrite, StubHub, Lyte, Gametime, The Ticket Fairy) and New York (e.g. Seated, Blockparty, SeatGeek, TodayTix, YellowHeart).

To me, this is a testament to how even a ticketing platform that focuses on music is ultimately a tech and ecommerce company long before it’s an entertainment company, and needs close proximity to the appropriate resources accordingly.

I was also surprised at the number of other local cities housing relatively long-standing ticketing companies, including Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle and Toronto — suggesting that, unlike what a lot of musicians, artist-managers or record labels might think, in the ticketing world you don’t necessarily need to be located in a prime “music city” to be good at your job.