Access All Areas March 2020 | Page 32

MARCH | COVER FEATURE 1. 2. 3. GETTING INTO THE ‘NITTY GRITTY’ Following recommendations in the DCMS ' Live Music report, Access rounds up some of the key industry figures' concerns… TICKETING REFORM, AND RISKS The minutiae of how ticketing companies and venues can operate responsibly has been hotly debated… » 1. Lucinda Brown, venue business manager, Islington Assembly Hall We are often on the frontline receiving the emotional distress of fans that ticketing companies and promoters maybe don’t see so much. As Islington Assembly Hall, we decided that we wanted to be part of the solution to stop touts and secondary ticketing by making the decision to go with DICE, which is a digital ticketing company. We have noticed a dramatic difference in even our business, because before when a show was sold out, we would be at 75% capacity. As a small venue, it is one of the most distressing things: you are losing your bar sales, which is the thing that keeps you afloat in your business. With our change to digital ticketing, we have noticed that we are at 90% capacity on a sold-out show, which is where obviously all venues just want the customers to come in, the customers who 32 are buying the tickets to be in the venue. In this short space of time it has really improved, so we hope that everybody else will engage with a solution like this. The fact that all the other ticketing companies are having resale within their ticketing platforms is following the line that DICE have started with their waiting list, which enables fans to buy tickets from other fans who cannot go, and also ticket transfers, which is what we get asked as a venue every day: how can I give my ticket to my friend? » 2. Stuart Galbraith, Kilimanjaro Live To put it bluntly, we are starting to clear up the acne that has blighted our industry, and I think that we are coming to the point where we just have one major boil left to lance: Viagogo. Certainly, our company’s objective in our ticketing strategy is to sell as many tickets as possible and put as many tickets as possible into the hands of customers at face value. To that end, we run a wide distribution model. We sell tickets or make ticket allocations available to as many different outlets as we possibly can, and then obviously we benefit from the marketing input that we get from those in return and it helps amplify the profile of the tour. The problem we face is that if a rogue company or a company refuses to co-operate, at this point in time, because of the non-compliance on the detail of listing tickets under the CRAs—in other words, if a ticket has been blatantly sold at above face value, if it does not carry seat, row and block information or its unique ticket number, we are powerless because we cannot identify where that ticket came from or, indeed, the exact detail of that ticket to enable us to cancel it and then put it back in the marketplace at face value. » 3. Andrew Parsons, managing director, Ticketmaster There has been much greater effort to be able to establish who those primary sellers are and who you should be looking to go to. STAR, the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, is obviously also offering an official kitemark for that, which we always try to be able to point to. I think there is a greater degree of transparency now than perhaps there once was, but I am sure there is more that can be done. We want to get to a point where more and more we take away the pieces of paper that enable people to very easily move them on—for them to be very easily touted—and to move to a digital world where we are able to exercise controls in conjunction with the artist, manager, producer, event organiser, whoever that might be, and their wishes. I do absolutely agree that technology is going to be the solution to this. We are already seeing it now and I think it will go further in that direction, absolutely. As experienced across many e-commerce businesses, there is a war against bots. Bots have become really sophisticated and represent a moving target. As such it is impossible to give a definitive position as to any one specific bot. In response we have assembled a dedicated team that have built and constantly update a very