Last Saturday the Central Division-leading Cleveland Indians played against local rival Detroit Tigers in what turned out to be an exciting, 13 inning affair that Cleveland won with a walk-off, bases loaded single from Adstrubel Cabrera. Over 28,000 people saw the game and many stayed for the fireworks display afterwards. It was announced that there were over 11,000 game-day sales and over 8000 walk-up tickets sold:
@castrovince Anthony Castrovince Tonight’s attendance: 26,433. Walkup traffic was 8,059. Third-largest walkup in ballpark’s history. 11K tickets sold today alone.
An astounding number that kept many queued at the gate until well after the game had started. Amazing too that in an increasingly mobile commerce world, event ticketing remains largely a fixed-internet, paper-based (or hard tickets as they are known in the industry) sale. In the UK, Royal Mail earns several hundred million pounds every year from people who are posting bits of paper with barcodes on them. It’s clear that consumers are way ahead of the industry on this one. Last month Seatwave released the first version of an iPhone application that let’s customers find tickets for concerts happening in the coming few days wherever in the world they happen to be. The app, which we’re very proud of, but is not earth-shattering, has been ranked as high as the 7th most popular music app in the UK and thousands of customers are down-loading it each week across dozens of countries. So why has mobile ticketing, which even British Airways has embraced, not been widely adopted in the live events space? Event ticketing is a multi-constituent value chain and many of the parties compete with one another in select areas of business and are business partners in others.
While AEG, the second largest venue operator in the world recently announced they would exit a ticketing agreement with Live Nation’s Ticketmaster division, the two companies work closely as LN promotes events in AEG buildings and vice versa. Like many industries, ticketing has an increasingly complex value chain, some companies market and sell tickets to the public, some provide inventory management and some provide access control – the scanners at the door, and some further still make the hardware and software within each of these systems. Very few companies, like Ticketmaster and. CTS, are vertically integrated to do all these things.
TM sees this as a market advantage, which it is, and usually seeks to perpetuate an Apple-like walled garden environment. That generally takes the shape of not sharing or opening these systems to other companies, in otherwords, there is no eco-system in ticketing like you see around Facebook, just a group of companies trying to build a moat around their businesses. As a result, the companies that push innovation get locked out from the large, main-stream supply that the TM’s and CTS’s of the world control. Likewise, the duopolists have little interest in innovation that is solely focused on customer experience rather than projection of their power. Thus,we have virtually no mobile ticketing while consumers regularly and loudly request it. This does present an opportunity for new players in the market who may have leverage in other areas of entertainment they can bring to bear.
