Music Ally

In last week’s Music Ally PDF Report, we examined the emerging world of self-service electronic ticketing, interviewing executives from companies including See Tickets, Clubtickets and Eventbrite. In this week’s blog we focus in on some individual interviewees to discover more about their particular insights; kicking things off is Matt McNeill, CEO of eTickets.to.

If you’re not yet a Music Ally subscriber you can sign up for a two week trial in a matter of minutes to read the original article as well as stories dating back nearly ten years. Meanwhile, for the Q&A with eTickets.to’s Matt McNeill, continue reading after the jump.

Q: What inspired you to create eTickets.to?

A: The initial idea came from looking at the exorbitant booking fees on tickets, looking at the process and realising there were vast inefficiencies there. So we looked at ways the business model could be improved. Is there a need for a middleman there to process the transaction? We view ticketing as a process rather than as a financial intermediary.

Q: How did you grow your customer base?

A: My background was founding [the mailing list service] Signup.to – so we had related contacts in the events field. Our main marketing channel has been word of mouth – we get a lot of customers by recommendation.

Q: Who did you consider to be your competitors at the time of launch?

A: Initially our competitors were the likes of Ticketmaster and Seetickets but our initial aims were towards the self service end of the market. Now we look after some events with tens of thousands of tickets, such as the Exit festival in Serbia. We occupy an interesting niche because our core customer base is small to mid size events and festivals who are not being well served by the conventional ticketing providers.

Q: How do you differ from the usual ticket companies?

A: We don’t do any physical ticketing. For larger events we have a digital redemption system – a barcode-based secure real time service.

Q: In terms of payments getting to event promoters, how does the money change hands?

We support a broad range of payment providers from Google Checkout and PayPal through to Worldpay and any payment provider so the revenue goes from through to the promoter’s choice of payment provier. Promoters get the money direct

Q: How do your fees work?

A: For us it depends what level of service we’re providing. From self service where your costs are credit card transaction and fee for processing all the way up to bigger events where we supply all on the ground equipment and staff on the entry gate. We build that into a per ticket fee.

Q: What do you make of the debate over whether service charges should be “on the outside” so that customers pay it as a separate charge, or “on the inside” where they’re invisible to the ticket buyer?

A: From the consumer’s point of view there’s something to be said for including it in the face value of the ticket especially when they’re buying direct from the promoter. I don’t think that customers should have to understand what the fee is for.

Q: What’s your view on charging for print-at-home ticketing?

A: We don’t charge for print at home ticketing. It makes it a little bit of a mockery charging someone to print it at home.

Q: Big ticket providers like Ticketmaster usually hang on to the ticket income until after the event. Isn’t there a danger that customers might hand over their ticket money only to find the promoter spends it or goes bust before the event?

A: When you’re talking about credit card transactions to big promoters, with those customers have the safety of purchasing on a credit card and the due diligence of the bank providing the credit card facility. With the smaller ones you’re covered by PayPal and/or Google Checkout.

Q: What about marketing support? Can you offer help in publicising an event in the same way as the larger ticket sites?

The standard play from the bigger ticket agencies is that they offer marketing help but time and time again promoters say they don’t see any benefit from that.

But the key thing is ownership of the customer data and that relationship. With a lot of promoters they are spending time and money and pushing customers off to somewhere else. Buying a ticket should be the start of that relationship with the brand. The promoter should get ownership of that data not give it away.

I think it’s up to the promoters to a make sure they’re behaving responsibly and within the letter of the law. There are restrictions and it’s important that promoters use permission marketing and are transparent about what they intend to do

Q: What are your predictions for the future of ticketing?

A: The big ticketing providers are in a difficult position. If they start to launch their own online self-service options they’ll erode their major revenue streams and it will almost be like admitting they’ve been charging difficult fees all along.

Not in the short term but in the medium term near field ID chips in phones.

SMS and MMS was a non starter for mobile ticketing: to do it properly you need a barcode sent by MMS message. But there are two problems with MMS. Firstly the wholesale cost of an MMS is 25 pence…it’s an expensive way of delivering things…Secondly interoperability: you need to know what handset the customer has and how to repurpose your barcode to the device. So it’s a tech nightmare and that’s before you have the customer education to make sure they have their phone open at the gate.

But when there are RFID type chips in phones they start to offer up interesting possibilities for secure entry to events.

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Tags: concert tickets, etickets, etickets.to, matt mcneill, online ticketing, online tickets, self service ticketing

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 9:31 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.