Our Two Cents: Ticketing Trends at #TCP2018
Last week we attended the third Ticketing Professionals Conference, a welcome chance to catch up with friends and colleagues as well as meeting the new movers and shakers in the ticketing industry. And there were certainly lots of new players and market entrants present across the two days in Birmingham, UK; pointing to an industry that is in rude health, but one that is also in a state of change.
Our very own Rob Edwards, ticketing veteran and COO of Artos, had been invited to speak as part of the “My Two Cents” discussion around ticketing trends, alongside other industry leaders from the International Ticketing Association, AudienceView, GalaPrompter, Boom ents and Tessitura Network.
Conversation during the panel focussed largely on how to make ticketing as consumer-centric as possible; from accessibility of venues (which should be embedded from the outset, rather than tacked on at the end as an after-thought), to controls within the secondary market (“We don’t want to see consumers abused by predatory prices”), to new entrants and innovation (which should be focussed upon “adding actual value” to the consumer, rather than innovating for innovation’s sake).
However, there was acknowledgement of the fact that the industry can be resistant to transformation, as evidenced by Amazon Tickets’ much-publicised decision to shut up shop only 18 months after launching.
“As many ticketing start-ups have discovered, taking on the big traditional players in this market is tricky, even if your platform is more consumer-friendly and provides better data to promoters,” said Andy Malt in Complete Music Update last month, “The key challenge is getting access to tickets for the big shows, because venues and promoters often have strong partnerships with the traditional ticket agents.”
But if Amazon can’t make it, with its well-established brand and wealth of consumer data, what hope for smaller start-ups in the space? The panel cautioned that the industry needs to be more open to change, particularly if it leads to better experiences for consumers. “New entrants into the market have to be positive because — however complex ticketing is — new ideas and innovation help everyone,” said Edwards, before later concluding that “new people in the industry are best placed to question existing practices”.
This importance of being open to new ideas in the space — even if it could spell “the end of ticketing” (at least as we know it) — was echoed and embellished later in the culminating conference keynote, presented by Audience View’s Rob Williams in a “brilliant, visionary end to #TCP2018”.
Williams laid out what he sees as some of the pillars of ticketing-to-come: BioMetrics, BlockChain, Artificial Intelligence and Beacons.
Each at different stages in their evolution, how these new technologies eventually play together in the space remains to be seen — and definitely something we’ll be thinking and consulting on as we continue to develop a ‘blockchain for ticketing’ product roadmap here at Artos.
