Aventus’ Strategy to Disrupt the Ticketing Market
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If you haven’t yet, please check out our posts explaining how the event ticketing industry works and the problems we think it has, and our brief dive into our solution to these problems. This post will consist of a brief analysis of our target market segments and how we plan to tackle them.
Market Overview
The Primary Ticketing Market
The size of the global online primary ticketing market is estimated to be £23.0bn in 2017 and has a CAGR of 14% between 2017 and 2021, resulting in a size of £39.0bn in 2021.
As shown below, cinema and theatre is the largest segment with a 41% market share and size of £9.4.0bn, and the U.S. is the highest revenue-generating geographical region with a market share of 35% and a size of £8.0bn.
The Secondary Ticketing Market
The global online secondary ticketing market, on the other hand, is amongst the fastest growing markets within the live entertainment industry and has an estimated size of £6.8bn in 2017 and a CAGR between 2015 and 2021 of 19%, resulting in a total size of £13.9bn in 2021. As illustrated below, sports is the largest segment with a total size of £3.7bn in 2017 and a share of 55%, and the Americas is the largest geographical region with a total size of £3.0bn and a share of 45%.
It should be noted that the discrepancies in growth rates of the primary and secondary markets can be alluded to both the increasing emergence of online ticket marketplaces and the rise in bulk-buying bot software (and corresponding decrease in price of such software).
Analysis and Selection of Aventus’ Target Segments
Given the data above and the analysis below, both the sports and music segments were chosen for our target market, in the U.S. and the U.K. This is primarily because of our team’s geographical reach, and the fact that they have the largest secondary market shares, which is where the main Aventus value proposition lies.
Sports
In the sports industry, 22–27% of total revenue can be attributed to ticket sales (using data from U.K. football clubs and overall north American sports data). Interestingly, ticketing revenue’s growth rate is one of the lowest for sports teams at a CAGR of 2.6% between 2015 and 2029, despite the fact that it accounts for over 50% of the secondary market which grows at 19% year on year.
This disparity can be explained by the fact that sports teams (and leagues) broker deals with online ticketing platforms (e.g. Stubhub and MLB), whereby teams are paid a lump sum in exchange for most, if not all, of ticket resale revenue. Hence, these teams only see a fixed and small portion of the growing market.
These exclusive deals between sporting leagues and ticket resale platforms are prevalent in the U.S. In the U.K. on the other hand, Premiere League teams usually have a selection of authorised ticket resellers in non-exclusive deals.
Music
The online music and concert event ticketing industry in total is estimated to be £9.26bn in 2017, and the best performing geography is the U.S. with 34.1% market share.
This segment is particularly important because the decline in revenue from recorded music is becoming ever more problematic in the music industry. More artists are turning to concert tours and music festivals as their primary revenue stream, resulting in live music accounting for 64% of industry revenue. This is shown in the figures for the top 50 worldwide tours, which grossed £1.5bn in 2015, increasing 14.4% year on year.
The Aventus Strategy
Initial Strategy
Initially, to make sure the minimal viable product has sufficient functionality at a high enough standard, Aventus will trial the product in July at a music concert in London, United Kingdom. More details will be released soon. After a couple of successful trials in summer of 2017, Aventus will move onto trials in the sports segment in the second half of the year. It should be noted that in earlier trials, resale volume will be small since the events will have less than 1000 attendees each.
Within the U.S., Ticketmaster and Live Nation relationship represents one of the most significant barriers to entry since Live Nation exclusively uses Ticketmaster for all of its ticketing, and currently holds over 20% market share of the region’s live entertainment industry. Therefore, Aventus will not attempt to enter this market alone but rather look to cultivate a similar relationship with another live entertainment company in the U.S. Details about this will follow in the coming weeks.
Sports Segment
In the sporting segment, since the U.S. also has high barriers to entry due to the exclusivity contracts between leagues such as the MLB and secondary ticketing platforms, where as mentioned above teams are paid a lump sum in exchange for most, if not all, of ticket resale revenue. It is therefore strategically unfavourable for us to start in the U.S. segment since it would be significantly more difficult to gain immediate traction.
In the U.K. on the other hand, there are no league-wide exclusivity contracts, and the majority of teams do not have exclusivity deals with any ticketing platforms, as stated above. Further, as our advisor Mike Waterson notes in his review of the U.K.’s secondary ticketing market, most teams and secondary market platforms are in violation of the new Consumer Rights Act (CRA), which forces teams to explicitly mention all authorised ticket re-sellers, and requires all re-sellers to identify themselves as such and notify the consumer of the face value of the ticket they are selling. Hence, the U.K. sports industry represents the best market opportunity for Aventus to tackle as an individual company due to low strategic barriers to entry and large opportunity with respect to regulatory requirements. In particular, we will initially focus efforts on U.K. football leagues.
We are confident that we have a good value proposition for teams in these leagues, as (a) any application using our protocol abides by the new CRA; and (b) we can allow them to stop resale (or resale at inflated prices) altogether, and gain a new revenue stream from secondary markets. In fact, we’ve estimated that we can give Premiere League football teams over 5% of their match-day revenue back if they use our system and take resale commissions themselves.
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