Tracer
A few weeks ago, I bought tickets to an event. I didn’t even bother looking at one of the major ticketing companies. I knew it was sold out, and went straight to the secondary. I paid 13x the face value of the ticket. Then I paid an 18% ticket fee. Ouch. (It turns out I got off easy — ticket fees are often as high as 40% these days.)
When Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, regulators were confident there was enough room in the market for healthy competition to thrive. Yet if you’ve purchased tickets to any major event in the last few years, you’ve seen that prices are at record highs and fees continue to climb. And that’s before you even start to look at resale prices. Within the $46B ticketing industry, secondary ticket sales from companies like StubHub and Viagogo generate $15B. Rights holders currently don’t have access to any of the revenue from these sales, and more importantly, they’re at an arm’s length from the fans who are purchasing, unable to engage the people who are critical to their success.
Artists are fed up. Promoters are fed up. Fans are fed up.
It’s been almost three decades since we’ve seen a major paradigm shift in the ticketing industry, but blockchain presents just that — an elegant solution to many of the challenges in the space — and ticketing represents one of the first real meaningful applications of the technology. We’re excited to back one of these projects, Tracer, whose event ticketing solution enables artists and promoters to track and manage the entire journey of a ticket.
The company is led by Jorge Díaz Largo, a former member of the management team at Ticketbis, which was sold to StubHub. In June, for the first time ever, Tracer’s Smart Ticket was used at The Cambridge Club Festival (UK) to seamlessly issue and process 9,000 tickets on the blockchain.
Check out what they’re up to at https://www.tracerhq.com/.
