Blockchain Is The ‘Golden Ticket’ the Live Events Industry Has Been Waiting For

The live event ticketing industry has long struggled with fraud, scalping, and overpriced tickets. These issues are becoming increasingly prominent, with Live Nation, the dominant market leader and owner of Ticketmaster, recently facing antitrust concerns from US lawmakers.

DLT offers a timely solution: a decentralized architecture could address systemic problems and consumer frustrations, and create a win-win for all market participants. It also opens the door to more refined approaches to customer loyalty in the events space.

• Immutable Digital Ticketing: Blockchain-based tickets can no longer be duplicated or altered nefariously, with their unique digital signatures rendering fraud and counterfeits virtually impossible. As digital assets, tickets are easily tracked on a system that natively supports issuance, redemption, and accounting workflows.
• Visibility on Data: Digital ticketing provides event organizers with more granular consumer data. All transactions and ticket transfers, including previously invisible secondary sales, are recorded. This offers a bird’s-eye view of the entire ticketing ecosystem: who is buying tickets, how they are buying them, and how they are using them. It also presents opportunities for new, innovative loyalty initiatives powered by a deeper understanding of customers.
• End Scalping and Ticket Hoarding: The requirement for credentials at the protocol level provides one solution to the problem of bad actors. Alternatively, as the technology emerges in the public blockchain space, decentralized or sovereign identity could play its own role. Whichever strategy is seized upon, by removing intermediaries, predatory resellers, and bots, a decentralized architecture would help organizers clean up peer-to-peer ticket sales. They could then place limits on the markup price of resold tickets or require that all resale transactions take place on an official platform.
• Smart Contracts: Sophisticated code can establish a fairer, more transparent playing field for all participants. Smart contracts could help to render platforms regulatorily compliant, in turn, lowering the legal and regulatory burden for participating organizations. Automation could even enforce ticketing rules and enhance user experiences, while reducing operational costs for organizers. Limits could be placed on the number of tickets an individual could purchase and refunds could be provided to ticket buyers the moment a planned event is canceled.
• Novel Customer Experiences: The potential for improvements in the customer experience are already being demonstrated by current experimental use cases, from Ticketmaster enabling event organizers to issue NFTs to the Dallas Mavericks issuing NFTs as collectible rewards for loyal game attendees.

It’s time for the ticketing industry to evolve. A decentralized architecture would create the ability to uproot bad actors and create a more data-enabled, secure, transparent, and equitable system for all parties.

This requires some creative thinking from relevant innovators. One path would be to integrate a decentralized ticketing architecture with a modern tokenized loyalty system, with the aim of maximizing the crossover benefits. If we take, for example, Belgium’s Kate Coin — this could present exactly the sort of synergy needed to generate lift.

For both blockchain loyalty and blockchain-based tickets, DLT offers improved transparency, security, efficiency, and flexibility. Both use cases also share the highly disruptive quality of programmability. Tokenized loyalty points can be calibrated to serve only specific groups of customers, with conditions placed on issuance, redemption, and exchange options. While the programmability afforded by DLT to ticketing, combined with NFTs, for example, opens up avenues for more dynamic, creative experiences and collaborations between organizers and artists/celebrities.

Blockchain’s disintermediation will also have a profound impact on both use cases. Removing intermediaries from the ticketing industry can reclaim the space for organizers and consumers, generating engagement and eliminating pain points like excessive pricing. And for loyalty, it can lead to smoother, more immediate redemption options, shrinking the ‘earn and burn’ points cycle.

For all of the above reasons, combining ticketing and loyalty through blockchain has the potential to create an entirely new, dynamic, peer-to-peer market for experiences.

IntellectEU specializes in co-creating enterprise-grade blockchain solutions, helping leading institutions navigate complex new domains through our deep business and technical expertise. If you would like to discuss this or any other potential use cases, reach out to us at info@intellecteu.com.