15 min
#32 Concert Tickets - The Australian Problem The Sound Age - Music industry Podcast
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- Music Commentary
A few years back I was looking to make a ticketing site that essentially scrapped booking fees, we got to the point where we had an investor working with us, but researching small venues we found out that Australia was uniquely different than the rest of the world. Almost every single small venue in Australia had EXCLUSIVE deals with 1 or 2 ticketing sites. This doesn't seem like a problem until you think what are tickets in 2022? In 2004 tickets were lining up in a newsagents waiting for the 6am ticket release and buying from a person behind a booth. Today it's an email with a qr code attached. But the booking fees have never changed. You still pay 10-15% or more on top of your $20 ticket for your local venue that holds 350 people.
It makes sense for stadiums and festivals and major tours to use a ticketing site, but these days small clubs can very easily sell their own tickets, they can collect their customers data to form a mailing list, $3 per person doesn't sound like that much of an issue, but that's over $1000 every night in a club that holds 350 people. In the local music scene that's a lot of money. If venues sold their own tickets they could save the customers money or they could use that extra money to pay local bands $1000 more every night.
A few years back I was looking to make a ticketing site that essentially scrapped booking fees, we got to the point where we had an investor working with us, but researching small venues we found out that Australia was uniquely different than the rest of the world. Almost every single small venue in Australia had EXCLUSIVE deals with 1 or 2 ticketing sites. This doesn't seem like a problem until you think what are tickets in 2022? In 2004 tickets were lining up in a newsagents waiting for the 6am ticket release and buying from a person behind a booth. Today it's an email with a qr code attached. But the booking fees have never changed. You still pay 10-15% or more on top of your $20 ticket for your local venue that holds 350 people.
It makes sense for stadiums and festivals and major tours to use a ticketing site, but these days small clubs can very easily sell their own tickets, they can collect their customers data to form a mailing list, $3 per person doesn't sound like that much of an issue, but that's over $1000 every night in a club that holds 350 people. In the local music scene that's a lot of money. If venues sold their own tickets they could save the customers money or they could use that extra money to pay local bands $1000 more every night.
15 min