Music Ally

In the second part of a five-part series on self-service ticketing we speak to Steve Machin, whose extensive experience at companies from Ticketmaster to Tixdaq to Live Nation’s Ultrastar makes him a leading expert in the world of entertainment ticketing.

Steve’s comments can also be found within a feature in last week’s Music Ally PDF Report alongside insights from executives at companies including See Tickets, Clubtickets and Eventbrite. 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 Steve Machin, CEO of Stormcrowd, continue reading after the jump.

Q: You’ve gone from heading up an interesting ticket analysis startup (Tixdaq) to helping fans meet rock megastars KISS – tell us a bit about your involvement in the ticketing space right now.

A: Most of the ticketing work I’m doing is around helping brands and artists to understand and execute progressive ticketing programmes, especially across Europe. For example I help to coordinate the European fanclub ticketing activity for artists such as U2 and KISS and recently looked after the premium package sales process for thirty KISS shows with more than ten vendors.  The KISS packages are big ticket items – the fans have a great experience and they’re happy to pay for a unique experience that offers exceptional value – a really good example of creating extra value for the fan and the artist.

Q: At previous roles, for example at Ticketmaster and Ticketweb, you’ve been involved in the intersection between ticketing and the web, particularly things like presales. How important is the internet to the ticket industry?

A: The internet has made it very easy for an agency aggregator of tickets to scale quickly. If you think of the evolution of ticketing, it started with lots of paper tickets; you had to buy at the venue box office to collect your ticket and pay for it. Then with the advent of credit cards they could post the tickets to you. Then agencies became dominant – Ticketmaster is the poster child for agency businesses.  I’m not sure when ticket agencies sprang up but Ticketmaster had its 30th birthday last year. Ticketmaster recognised the value of the internet, unlike their incumbent market leader in North America – Ticketron who invested heavily in telephone technology.

Q: What do you make of the new generation of online self-service providers like Eventbrite?

A: This new flurry of people providing ticket sales service to the smaller promoter is a good thing – it makes electronic ticketing available to the smallest promoters. What the internet is now doing for ticketing is that it has created choice. As with recorded music, where you used to have to buy the album but today you can just download the single, now there are many more types of ticket service available. It’s now within the reach of everyone – and indeed customers expect you to have online ticketing.

Q: Why is it that these small start-ups seem to be able to offer ticket provision at low prices when the established companies have big service charges?

A: The bigger companies can’t respond quickly enough whereas the online ticket providers have a lower cost base. They don’t have a massive apparatus, a staff of accountants, a IT department, to support. There are two tiers to the market: some events are so small that a large agency is not interested – they can’t operate a profit on those events.  That’s why I would suggest there’s a playoff between these lines on a graph: on the bottom axis ease of use then on other axes cost of using the service and cost to you the promoter.

Q: But even on the technology side of things, the newer companies seem to have better interfaces than some of the established ticket providers…

A: Ticketweb when it was launched was progressive – it was as self- service as you can get. So it got bought – and now there’s a battle for internal resource this would be the same with any company that gets acquired – and since then it hasn’t been developed to exceed. It’s not been developed to be the leader. For example, modern platforms are designed to work inherently on mobile phones.

Q: The complexity of online ticketing gets quite pronounced when a promoter is selling tickets through multiple channels. The various ticket-selling sites don’t always talk to each other. What can be done about that?

A: Some providers run everything off spreadsheets – the challenge is in the complexity and the age of the  transactional databases. If you are a promoter putting tickets onto a modern ticket platform it is possible to get an API out of that ticket platform and connect it to a variety of distribution channels that will help to grow sales.

Q: What are your predictions as to how online ticketing will develop?

A: Well, we’ve all been seduced by online search, but Google didn’t exist, search didn’t exist before 1996…so how did we find stuff? We were told about it. Now the internet has scaled so much that it facilitates intelligent recommendation, I’m more interested to know how smart people will use the data that is being generated on a massive scale.  What about geodata about the tickets?

Along with that come the benefits of e-ticketing: you can start a conversation with your customers, it was missing when people were just walking into the venue with a paper ticket. If you can scan a barcode on a print-at-home e-ticket or a mobile phone you can find out which fans arrive first…I can tell the manager of the support band which people came to see his band and that helps that artist develop connections with fans. Music clients have very engaged fans and the fans have a sense of expectation that the band will deliver to them online more value than they would have received before.

Q: What about the business side of things? How will that play out?

A: Ticketmaster won’t go the way of Ticketron but I can see mid-size agencies will lose some core business to smaller startups. And I  think with the flux in the marketplace there’s going to be a scramble for ticket inventory shortly…there’s currently a lot of inventory locked up in deals but as the market settles, as the competition commission hopes, there will likely be room for a new competitor or competitors in the marketplace.

Tags: clubtickets, kiss, online, online ticketing, self service ticketing, sell tickets online, Ticketmaster, tickets, ticketweb, Tixdaq, u2

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 11:30 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.