#324 - Ritesh Patel - The Economics of Live Events - Geezers of Gear

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The biggest thing is that if thepromoter doesn't stay in
business, nobody gets paid. And that's kind of that was the
driving factor in starting the ticketing company was finding
ways to unlock margin in a show that wasn't obvious because
there's always 5% here, 5% there, 3% there.

(00:23):
If you can find ways to unlock it, that is a way for the show,
it's going to profit without raising prices, without doing
anything sketchy, without scalping your own tickets.
There are ways to do it if you find the right tool kit, if you
find the right methods. And that's kind of what we got

(00:44):
obsessed with. It's like, you know, if you do
that in 10 places, you've just added 50% of the revenue.
But an E thing is not particularly remarkable or
impactful, but them all together, it's a really big
deal. Hello there and thanks for

(01:28):
joining me today on I don't knowthe episode number, but three
something. And so I wanted to talk a little
bit about a couple of events coming up at LDI this year that
I am involved in. And so one we started last year
which is called Dining with Dinosaurs.
And this was based actually on aconversation that I had on one

(01:51):
of my podcasts with Scott DeVos.And Scott said, you know, it'd
be great if we had like a networking event in this
industry that was real low key and was just a bunch of people
to getting together and maybe having some food and exchanging
conversations about the past andold stories and stuff like that.
Like kind of like almost like geezers of gear, but live in a,

(02:14):
in a dining setting. And he said maybe it could be
called Dining with Dinosaurs. And boom, you know, the idea was
born. And if you know me, you know
that I don't sit around on ideasfor very long.
I jump into them and, and createsome sort of a business or a
foundation around that idea. And so that's what we did.

(02:34):
And Scott has helped a lot. Sarah, I would say, is the
driving force behind this. But so last year, Dining with
Dinosaurs was born. We had no idea what we were
doing. I decided instead of trying to
do it on our own where you have to book a hall and have people
fly in and crazy things, that would have been a massive
undertaking and I just don't have the time or energy to do
that right now. But instead of doing that, we

(02:56):
would tag on with LDIA, very successful trade show that I've
been going to myself for over 30years.
Jeez. And so we contacted or I
contacted LDI, my friends at LDIand said, hey, we've got this
idea. And they were blown away.
They loved the idea. I thought they were going to be
offended dining with dinosaurs. And they loved it.

(03:18):
You know, to their credit, they jumped all over it.
They were pretty excited about it, got behind it, even though
we had no idea what we were going to do.
All we knew is you were going tohave these sort of older people
from the industry. I think the rule was you had to
be at least 55 to be a dinosaur.I don't even remember the exact
number that we were looking at, but and men or women from all

(03:41):
walks of the industry and they would have dinner and there
would sort of be these round tables with younger people or
people from the industry who wanted to learn or, or talk with
or network with these people. And so it was born.
And again, we didn't know what we were doing.
It was a little sloppy. But lo and behold, people showed

(04:02):
up. I think there were 60 or 70
people that that actually paid for a ticket to get into this
thing last year. And they had a great time.
And and, you know, the response was tremendous, including a lot
of response from the dinosaurs who came to me and Sarah and
told us, you know, they loved it.
They want to be involved either again or in addition, and they

(04:22):
had suggestions on how we could improve it.
And so, you know, Dining with Dinosaurs, you know, annual
event, I became year 2 and here we are.
And so this year, one of the bigdifferences is, first of all,
LDI is 100% behind it. Secondly, we had a lot of time
to plan. So we actually started I think

(04:43):
in around May or June to plan for this year.
Just had another meeting today. So it's fresh on my mind.
And the other big difference is that this year we are tying
Dining with Dinosaurs into another event, which I'm also
involved in. I'm one of the planners and
organizers and I don't even knowwhat my role is going to be the

(05:04):
day of the event, but it's called X live concert sessions
or X live the concert sessions. And it's, you know, it's been
called a mini Lititz. It really isn't a mini
conference at Lititz. It's just a one day deep dive
immersion into several differenttopics in concert touring.
We're not really getting involved much in, you know, the

(05:26):
health and the, you know, all ofthe things that everyone else is
getting involved in. It's more really just related to
the creative side of it, how to create a career in this
business, what can go wrong and how to get through those types
of things. And the list of people involved
in this are incredible. You can go to the LDI website

(05:48):
and look at it, but the list of people, well, first of all, sort
of the Co creator, Co organizer with me is Jake Berry, who, you
know, I don't really have to give a big introduction to, you
know who Jake is. He was on the podcast a few
weeks ago again. And so myself and Jake and of
course Sarah and then the team at LDI have been very active in

(06:09):
in getting this thing built. So the concept is that the day
before the show starts, and because of Formula One, the
show, now, I don't know if you know this, but the show doesn't
start until Sunday. So instead of starting on
Thursday like it has for so manyyears, the show starts on Sunday
now and the show will go, I'm sorry, on Saturday is going to

(06:30):
be sort of our day. So Saturday morning, I think at
9:00 is the beginning of X Live and that'll go all day till
5:00. And then at 5:30, dining with
dinosaurs starts and it goes, I believe till 9:30.
And so dining with dinosaurs is going to include a bar.
Of course, this year we're goingto have drinks with it.
So it's going to be dining and drinking with dinosaurs.

(06:53):
And of course, you don't have todrink.
We're not promoting alcohol consumption, but I'm sure there
will be some. And the dining isn't going to be
a sit down dinner or lunch like it was last year, which I felt
like just slowed the whole thingdown and got made it a bit
boring in that middle section. And some people just didn't have
time to eat either. So now it's going to be more
like if you've ever been to an upstaging party at the Wynn,

(07:15):
people walking around with traysof food, probably not as good as
the upstaging party at the Wynn because that food is just
tremendous. That party's been legendary for
years. But yeah, so it'll just be
people walking around with with hors d'oeuvres and snacks and
little mini burgers and whatever.
And so you can eat and have a drink and talk with some
incredible people. And I've got a list of the

(07:36):
dinosaurs that we have signed up.
We actually have a waiting list now of people who want to be
dinosaurs. It's that popular now.
So it's going to be a lot of fun.
Like I just think it's going to be one of those networking
events that you really, really want to be at.
And I'll tell you one of the things that that myself and
Sarah have fought really hard for is just the value, you know,

(07:59):
for it to be not expensive. And when you think of something
that's being held in a Convention Center and includes
drinks, open bar and food, you've got to be thinking that's
going to be $1000. You know, like a beer in a
Convention Center is 15 bucks orwhatever.
And but LDI has managed to to get it down to, I think it's one

(08:23):
O 9 right now, but it goes up atsome point soon because the
early bird deal is one O 9. And I think it goes up to 129.
And then eventually, like at thetime of the show, it's probably
going to be 149. So but, and that's one of the
only couple of stand alone tickets at the entire LDI show.

(08:44):
So we're kind of proud of that too.
Everything else you have to buy the big full conference pass to
get into, but this you can get in with just a single ticket.
So if you have free exhibit passes, you can just buy this
ticket and that'll get you into dining with dinosaurs.
Or if you want to do the full day conference the X live, I
believe that's 5:50-ish. And don't shoot me in the head

(09:07):
if I get this wrong by 10 bucks,but it's around 5:50.
And that includes the full day deep dive learning, educational
thing, plus dining with dinosaurs.
So yeah. And there's going to be swag.
There's going to be all kinds ofcool people involved.
And I think it's going to be an incredible day and a great way
to open up the show. And hopefully this becomes an

(09:28):
annual event where every year weopen the show with these two
events on the Saturday before the show.
So that is Dining with Dinosaursand X Live.
For more information, I guess you go directly to the LDI show
website and you can learn an awful lot about both of those
events. I know for a fact that they are

(09:48):
going to be great. And certainly I'm most friendly
with Dining with Dinosaurs because it really was, pun
intended, hatched on Gears of Gear and and we'll be very
closely tied to geezers of gear now and in the future.
So we're pretty excited about that.
And so yesterday or the day before, Craig Mitchell from LMG

(10:09):
put out a video on, I think it was LinkedIn or Facebook.
I can't remember which platform it was, but it was a video from
a guy called Maxonomics is his, is his YouTube channel.
And it was about ticketing in our industry and just sort of
the problems with ticketing and with Ticketmaster and with all

(10:31):
of this stuff. And it's an incredible
coincidence that we've booked a gentleman today who is in the
ticketing industry. And so I'm going to want to talk
to him a lot about this. But if you haven't seen this
video, please go look at it. Go go to YouTube and search for
Maxonomics, Ticketmaster or Maxonomics.
You could actually, it talks a lot about the Taylor Swift

(10:53):
heiress tour. So you could look up Taylor
Swift heiress, Maxonomics. And it's just, it's, it was very
educational for me. I knew a lot of this stuff was
going on, but there's stuff likethat I didn't know which we're
going to talk about on the podcast today, including, you
know, bots working for scalpers that are out grabbing tickets at

(11:15):
an incredible rate. So I hope you enjoyed today's
podcast. It is with Ritesh Patel, who is
the Co founder and CEO of the ticket Ferry, an all in one
ticketing and marketing platformhelping events and venues grow
revenue, cut risk and fight scalping, which will be a great
conversation today. He's also the founder of Locust,

(11:37):
a destination drum and bass festival in Mexico and Bali.
With over 20 years in live, liveentertainment and a background
in tech, Ritesh combines creative and technical expertise
to solve the toughest challengesfacing event producers today.
His motto? Leave the house and good things
happen. So please join me and welcome

(11:59):
Ritesh to Geez of Gear. Hey, Ritesh, how are you?
Hey. How are you myself?
Very good to meet you. I've actually been looking
forward to this because not onlyam I in this space and, and so I
look forward to talking about the whole ticketing platform
stuff, but I'm a tech guy too. And I'm one of the rare, I guess
people in our industry who is heavily into tech, where I'm not

(12:21):
talking about sound tech or lighting tech or whatever.
I'm talking about actual technology platforms and things
like that. So I'm looking forward to having
those conversations with you as well.
So, you know, I'm not even really sure where to start
'cause there's so much to to go on here.
But you know, one of the big things, I guess we can start
with, well, before you were a ticketing guy, you were a a

(12:43):
festival guy, right? So I, yeah, I started in club
shows in 2000, so like super underground gigs in the UK in
the drawer and base scene, whichis notoriously one of the
hardest scenes to make any moneyfrom whatsoever, yeah.
I can imagine. You know, it's like the Super
underground gigs, low ticket prices, you're especially if

(13:06):
you're breaking new talent, likeyou know, it's it's a lose,
losing scenario for two out of three gigs.
And so like, you know, like any promoter who does stuff in
either in the first few years orjust in underground music in
general, you're subsidizing it with with a day job.
So I kind of when really heavy on on tech when I was a kid and

(13:27):
started building software duringhigh school.
And so like I got to college, found music and pies and the
drawing base scene and decided that I'd already done all the
tech I needed to in my teenage years.
And suddenly throwing raves was my new passion.
So that kind of took took over my life for a while and then

(13:47):
over like a decade basically didtwo things in parallel, throwing
gigs and then working in tech. So yeah, it's definitely been
like, I think at one point I wassleeping 2 hours a night.
Oh my God. Growing 5 gigs a month, full
time job in tech and then all the parties that go with the
scene was pretty intense. Yeah, you know, it's funny how

(14:12):
close the two, like the border between tech and, and whether
it's EDM or or drum and bass or whatever.
It's it's amazing how closely aligned those two are because,
you know, I know so many tech guys and CEOs and stuff who, who
go to Burning Man, for example, you know, with their massive
rigs and stuff. But but still it's it's the

(14:33):
cultures sort of connect, I guess.
There is a commonality I've I've.
I've only really just figured itout.
And so just let's just say my scene, for example, not
electronic music in general, it seems like what we've discovered
is drum and bass is a genre is full of neurodivergent people

(14:54):
who all found a tribe and it's not that different to the text
scene. Yeah, interesting.
So drum and bass, I admittedly know nothing about it, but I
know the music, but I don't really know the culture or the
events or anything. So can I assume that they're
smaller sort of ravy kinds of events, not necessarily like big

(15:15):
EDM festivals? Yeah, absolutely.
And even when it's got to a point where the commercial
artists in the because DNB goes through phases of being
commercial and popular and then suddenly, you know, like
everyone jumps on it. And and then after a few years,
it's like drawing bass is dead. And suddenly, you know, there's
a mixed MAGA school that says drawing bass is dead and all the

(15:38):
major labels that were super on it drop it.
And because it's no longer the core thing.
And in the periods of time whereit's popular, it does end up you
can do big gigs, but only in thekind of like top ten artists
like you would in any genre That's like, you know, 10 right?
And those shows, they might get 2003 thousand 5000 people, but

(16:02):
they're more like headliner concert acts rather than like,
you know, a promo and, and, and,and the bigger promoters are the
ones that do those because the the fees are too high for an
independent to actually even do those gigs.
But they're not, they're definitely not the 1020 thousand
person headline shows. There's one exception in the UK,

(16:23):
which is Boomtown Fair, which which comes out of Bristol and
it's built its reputation on pushing drum, bass and reggae
and dubstep and that whole bass music culture.
And they grew to about 60,000 people.
But that's about as big as you. And that's, that's like, that's
an anomaly. Like that doesn't usually
happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(16:44):
You know, especially in a world where EDM festivals have gotten
so completely, insanely huge at this point.
Like some of them are just, what's the one in Saudi?
What's that one called? Oh, so there's middle beast in
Saudi, which is insane. Yeah, yeah.
I think that's like 500 people or something.
Exactly. Yeah, that one's huge.

(17:06):
And but it's weird because it's a real crossover kind of thing.
Like I think Metallica played there last year.
And so, you know, it's very, I think a lot of them are becoming
that actually a lot of the sort of music festivals are sort of
seeing EDM merge into them. Like I saw there was some stuff
at, what was it? Lollapalooza now has a bunch of

(17:27):
EDM or DJs anyways. I don't know if you call it EDM,
but there's DJs that are acts throughout that thing along with
bands. Yeah, and, and, and it depends
on which, where the that festival started originally and
then how it moves to almost to center right.
So like I still in Australia in I think 2009 and they had two

(17:52):
main stages and there was alternating acts.
So like, you know, an act, an act would play that stage would
go into changeover, then the next stage would start.
And if they were like literally next to each other.
And I remember that the mainstage had Rage Against the
Machine on the left and Bjork onthe right and, and it was like,
OK, well I went there for Bjork and I was loving it.

(18:13):
But all the Rage fans were booing Bjork because they were
waiting for Rage to come on. And it was the same but just the
2 next to each other with different production.
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting.
No, but again, even Metallica alongside EDM acts is just, I
mean, I guess Metallica is a lotmore mainstream now than they
were in the 80s or whatever, butit's still very strange to me

(18:36):
that that those two acts. I think bands were electronic
artists like pendulum really facilitated things like that
because they started as underground as underground drama
based producers and an event. But the two of the three band
member, two of the three membersof pendulum came from a like
rock, punk, metal background. And So what they ended up doing

(18:59):
is creating a live act from the a Ridge from the pendulum like
drawing base electronic music origins and you know, did a
pendulum live show. But if you watch a Pendulum live
show, it might as well be like Metallica style, you know,
they've, they've got the vocals,we've got the emo vibes, they've
got like, you know, the the kindof metal punk energy to that

(19:20):
gig. And you would never think that
it's an electronic music show. Interesting.
I'm going to, I'm going to have to look that up.
I, I don't know them, but I'm going to check them out.
And you know, I like, you know, again, I'm an old guy, I grew up
with 70s and 80's rock and, but I really like a lot of the
merged music now. Like, you know, for example,
Black Country artists, you're starting to see a lot more Black

(19:41):
Country artists and they tend tobring a little more soul, a
little more R&B into country music.
And I love some of that stuff, like some of that that sort of
merged genres. I really like the end result
from it. And even, you know, country to
rock has become much more merged.
You you're starting to see, well, I mean, years ago you saw

(20:04):
the the hip hop guys that were starting to put out rock stuff
and you're starting to see some of that become a little, you
know, ubiquitous. And I like it.
I like merged styles. Thank you for joining me today
on Geezers of Gear. This episode is brought to you
by Delicate Productions. Since 1980, Delicate Productions

(20:24):
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tours, corporate launches, awardshows, sporting events and
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get it right is to get it just right.
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(21:07):
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(21:55):
technical brilliance meets creative impact.
You see, I had this conversationliterally about three hours ago.
We were talking about this fusion element of a lot of the
modern artists. And like, you know, you take
someone like Doja Cat and it's like, it's not quite hip hop,
it's not quite pop, it's not quite electronic, and it's a
fusion of all of them. True.
Yeah, True, true. And I like that.

(22:17):
So you were doing these festivals straight out of
college basically? Right.
I did club shows and then the festival that I produce now is
the same drum and bass brand from the early 2000s having kind
of taken 10 years off to build, to build ticket ferry on the
ticketing side. We we launched the the ticket
platform in Mexico in Tulum in early 2021 through just having

(22:43):
beach venues in Mexico as a client.
There was this kind of I guess you know how it goes once you've
been a promoter, you're always apromoter like, you know, even if
you've lost loads of money doingit, you always, you know, you
walk into a field or a warehouseor some random space and you're
like, oh, I could throw a reallycool party here.
And the kind of that that happened and I and I approached

(23:04):
one of the venues, I was one of our ticketing clients and I was
like, hey, there is a big gap inthe market for a multi day
destination drone base festival.It does not exist in the
Americas. And there's a huge market
opportunity to do it. And took a year to convince them
because Salome is all house music at house and techno for

(23:25):
them to even understand what I wanted to do.
And I was like, right, let's let's launch a festival and then
let's use my ticketing and marketing tech to actually run
the show. And so it was a real convergence
of, you know, like 2025 years of, of different elements of
things are done. So this was sort of simultaneous

(23:45):
like you were doing these eventsand then I assume there was some
there was a need that you had discovered for a different type
of ticketing platform. Was it just to get away from
like Ticketmaster or did Ticketmaster not exist for these
types of events? You know what it was?
It was, I'd thrown 450 shows across the UK and Australia of

(24:08):
various sizes. And the one thing that you kind
of realize is that everything is, I was, let's switch it
around. Nothing is predictable, right?
So I could have a gig that I think is going to sell out.
Everyone says they're going to for some reason, you know,
there's a sports game or it rains or whatever it is and you

(24:31):
actually end up losing a bunch of money.
And then there's others where you've sold next to no pre
sales, but it's a slam dunk and it's packed, right?
You've only done 50 pre sales, but there's 500 people in the
room. The thing that was really
consistent is that basically every promoter needs just that
extra push of the 10 or 20% morein, in sales, right?
Like that's why they're going toget you from a loss to a break

(24:54):
even or a break even to profit. And I'd been working in AD tech
in, I was living in Australia atthe time and I'd been working in
AD tech figuring out how like affiliate marketing works, how
ad clicks work, how conversions work.
You know, how digital marketing is, is, is built and on the back
end. And I was working, working an ad
network where I was building the, the big data infrastructure

(25:15):
for these ad networks. And I was like, wait a second,
like there is a way you can use utilize ad tech to help
promoters to actually generate more revenue, especially the
unsophisticated promoters we haven't quite discovered adds
additional marketing. This was like 2009, 2010, there
was this brain wave and I was like, I think I've got it.

(25:37):
And basically it was what, you know, you get those I like bulb
moments where you think, I think, I think we have something
big. And I was, I was literally on
the bus on the way home on a Sunday And you know, you just
like gasped yourself in like, ohshit, this is a big deal.
And basically what came into my head was if I built a ticketing
platform that looks like a ticketing platform, but upon

(26:02):
someone buying a ticket to a show, the platform would tell
them, hey, you've got your ticket, the credit card
transaction went through, everything is cool, that
ticket's in your inbox. How would you like your money
back? If you want a full refund on
your ticket, why don't you promote the show and help the
promote to drive more sales? And if you do that.
Concept. Your money refunded.

(26:23):
Yeah, yeah, Way to sign up an affiliate like right at the
point of sale, you know, Perfect.
Well. I mean, you've got the right
they just click submit on their credit card.
Info Not only have you got theirattention, but you've got a fan,
you've got somebody who has already purchased the product.
Who better than I used to call them sneezers, which I stole

(26:44):
from Seth Godin a long, long time ago.
But basically people who take something that they've bought a
a new iPhone and you know, go out and tell everyone about it.
Like some people just buy it quietly and use it and they're
good. Other people like me tend to go
tell everyone this is the greatest device ever.
You need to have one of these. And those are the people you

(27:06):
want to snag right at that pointof.
Sale Here's the thing those two people will likely feel the same
about that device that iPhone they bought right One is telling
people the other one isn't and like up until that kind of this
idea was in my head. The way ticketing worked and
actually still works with everyone else is that you see

(27:28):
the gig, you go through the checkout, you pay your money
soon as you you get you realize that the payments gone through
you close the tab immediately. You find the e-mail three or six
months later and you you pull upyour ticket and you go to the
gig and it's kind of like, well why wouldn't you take someone
that's spend money on a show they have assigned value.
They don't want to go by themselves and just push that

(27:50):
idea into their head while you have the way, while you they're
looking at the screen and go be like, well, you're going to want
to go with friends anyway. And why don't you?
And, and, and if we do that withevery buyer, we've just created
an army of affiliates and distribution of people that are
willingly paying for this gig who will willingly ask other

(28:11):
people to pay for this gig because they assign that show of
value themselves. So but how do the economics work
on that? Like how many tickets does a
person have to sell to recover their?
So what we modeled it is that ifyou can drive 2 more sales, you
get 10% of your money back. If you can drive 5 sales, you
get 30% of your money back. And if you can drive 8, it used
to be 10 but now it's 8, you get100% refund and you go for free

(28:35):
and. Only 8 tickets.
You got to sell your tickets andyou get your ticket for free.
That's pretty cool. Only 8 And The thing is, we get
people who have sought who then end up generating like 20-30
fifty tickets, right? And the promoter can optionally
choose to give them some sort ofbenefit.
It could be AVIP upgrade. It could be a backstage thing,

(28:56):
could be an artist meet and greet.
You know, that is up to the promoter.
But like you get your ticket money back.
And the benefit of you driving more sales is that you've just
got a bigger crew to go with. Like you've you've you've
enhanced the experience for yourself and you've got it for
free. And you know, the the promoter
gets accelerated sales, they getearly revenue, they get more

(29:18):
visibility into the show's goingto be a success.
And they can figure out like if they if we sell them out six
weeks earlier than they would have done without this, they can
do another gig. They can expand capacity.
They don't have to spend spray and prey marketing right right
up into the lead up of the gig like a lot of benefits.
So what? What percentage of buyers take
you up on this? Surprisingly, over 30% of

(29:40):
buyers. That's wild.
Wow, what a great concept. I love that.
I'm going to, I'm going to stealthat and, and use it in my
business. You know, go sell this piece of
gear over here and we'll get youyour money back.
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Connect dot. SO one of the big questions I

(31:52):
have about your your business ticket ferry.
So is it sort of off the beaten path or are you now going real
mainstream with the ticketing, you know, a pop back playing
arena? I mean, arenas are a tricky one,
right? Because, you know, typically the
venues are managed or operated by the live nations and the

(32:13):
ticket masks of the world. We'll do the odd arena show.
Sometimes it'll be outside of music.
So like we're doing a, we're ticketing a 23rd.
And this isn't exclusively ticketing.
We're exclusively ticketing a 20,000 person E sports and
gaming final in Budapest, for example.
And that's fully seat mapped. And that's, it's a, it's a
proper arena. And so we'll do those every so

(32:33):
often. Or like, for example, we're
ticketing Twitchcon in San Diegoin October.
That's 30,000 people. And you know, that's like Amazon
and Twitch. It's a it's a big, big corporate
event. So we do do stuff up pretty big
scale, but it's also available to all the independent promoters
or the kind of the festivals that are doing 10/20/30 thousand
people like it. It supports all scales.

(32:56):
The I guess the biggest thing for us is that, you know, what
toolkit can we build beyond justtaking the payment that's going
to help the gig to streamline everything from conversions to
OPS to internal processes to guest list, you know, everything
in between. Like we've we talked to

(33:17):
promoters so closely and figure out where their bottlenecks are
and one by one solve them and all scale was like, you're going
to have bottlenecks. You just need to someone to come
in and build the solution for you.
Well, and I guess that you and the promoters are aligned and
that you're both trying to compete against, you know, the,
the juggernaut out there, obviously.
And so does that, does that makeyou, you know, obvious partners,

(33:42):
I guess with the, with the more independent promoters or the
smaller promoters or whatever, Because again, they're, they're
fighting against Live Nation, obviously.
They are now The thing is that we don't necessarily fight
against Live Nation because we never compete for the same deal
as right like I'm never going totry and get the ticketing
contract for a Live Nation venuebecause that would be silly.
Why? Why would I even try to do that?
But the one thing that has been become really clear over the

(34:06):
years is that no matter how big you are as a promoter, whether
you are Live Nation, whether youare someone who's really
starting out, is that at every scale you're at, you have
problems and needs solving. Like if your gig is not selling
out, you need to get to the point of selling out.
Once you're sold out, your problem is scalping.
If you 100,000 people showing upall at once on the door, your

(34:27):
problem is streamlined gates andmaking sure that the scanning
doesn't fail. Once you've got that, you've got
all the moving parts and operations of multiple stages
and artist logistics and advancing like every.
So people used to tell me like, why would a gig the cells out
need you? And I was like, well, it doesn't
matter because at every point there's a new problem or there's
a new set of problems once you hit a certain scale and

(34:48):
threshold. So if we've built all those
tools, then that's fine. We've all, we've always got
plans. Yeah.
But at the same time, I mean, when you're competing against a
or, or working alongside or working in the same business as
someone like a Live Nation, where they do have, you know, I
guess arguably a monopoly in that they have the artist
contracts and the venues and theticketing.

(35:11):
And you know, they have a pretty360 grab on on some of those
situations, whether it's, you know, festivals or, or touring
or sporting events or, or, or, or right.
Like they, they really do have afairly large grip on things
right now. So, but like, I, I can't even

(35:32):
imagine how hard it is to work against them.
But again, like you're saying, it's, it's a different scale,
it's different venues, it's different, whatever.
Yes, I don't really come across that challenge when it comes to
Live Nation Ticketmaster. Interesting.
Because of the the promoters that we, we are not working
with, sometimes we'll actually work within a Live Nation

(35:55):
ecosystem. So like for example, we ticket a
portion of EDC Las Vegas and it's that fine dining experience
inside EDC and it's a multi day experience where you book a time
slot like a dinner reservation. And then it's got like a, you
know, entertainment and food andlike, you know, open bar and
whatever for an hour. And then so we power the
bookings for those slots. And, you know, so like we do

(36:18):
often, not often, but sometimes cross into the ecosystem.
But more often than not, like, you know, it's one of the big
independents who's who's raised a lot of money that I'm
competing against, not the Live Nation ticketmasters.
Right. Interesting because, you know, I
know I know some independent promoters who have just given up
and gone into a different business or done something else

(36:38):
because it's just, you know, in most markets, they own at least
one venue, sometimes more than one.
And, you know, they, they have some tactics that make it very
difficult for some of these independent promoters to, to be
able to get artists even, you know, because they'll overpay an
artist to play their venue instead.

(36:59):
And then they'll lock them out for the next 18 months or
whatever their contract is. And you can't play any other
venues in this particular local or, or region or whatever.
So yeah, I don't know, like it. The 20 shows and instead of just
the one then it seems to track management of the artist, right?
Of course, Yeah, of course. And you know, it's it's sort of

(37:21):
a catch 22 as well because the artist doesn't necessarily want
to be owned by that big corporation.
But at the same time, you know, it's guaranteed payment.
And what are you going to do? Right?
Say no. But so just a couple of days
ago, maybe even yesterday, a gentleman from a large supplier
in our industry called LMG, Craig Mitchell, posted on his

(37:42):
social media a link to a video from someone called Maxonomics
on YouTube. And it was all about some of the
issues, I guess, with regard to the process and economics in the
ticketing world and what that's done to pricing, what that's
done to the sort of entire ecosystem.

(38:03):
And some of it I knew, some of it I completely understood.
You know, like he went back and said, you know, artists used to
tour to support record sales. You know, you, you went out and
played live so that people wouldbuy your albums.
And obviously that shifted and then artists had to focus on
touring as a business, as a profit generating business
because that's how they earn now.

(38:24):
And so that's obvious. We've all known that for some
time. But where it became a little
less obvious is just like I've always known that scalping was a
big problem, but they lean in pretty hard into the into the
business of, of scalpers and into Taylor Swift in particular.
They looked at the, the Eris tour and, you know, showed how

(38:46):
many premium seats there were overall for the whole tour, I
think was 152 shows and there were something like 1.5 million
premium seats. It's roughly 10,000 seats per
gig in a in a stadium that are floor seats.
And even though her model was four, I think it was 449 was the

(39:06):
highest price for a ticket, which were floor seats and it
was $49.00 for cheap seats. Nobody had access to those
because they ended up like in some cases, 40 to 50% of the
tickets were bought by scalpers and fairly specifically bots.
And I didn't know about this prior.

(39:26):
So some of the things that I saw, here's just a few stats
from this video that I found really, really interesting.
So all of the tickets for the Aris tour went on sale on
November 15th, 2022 at 10 AM. And within a very short period
of time, within like two or three hours, there were 13

(39:47):
billion requests for tickets. And there's only, what, 8 1/2
billion people in the world? I think there were 13 billion
requests for tickets, the sites crashing and all kinds of
technical problems. People waited online, in line
online for six hours in some cases.
You know, these crazy Swifties. And while they're waiting

(40:09):
online, they're looking at secondary sites who already had
tickets for anywhere from 5 to $30,000 for floor seats.
So this was like the Super Bowl for these scalpers who suddenly
had this this margin. And so by the way, those 1.5
million tickets, I think it was something like $650 million in

(40:32):
revenue for the entire tour for floor seats, but yet those sold
for somewhere between 3:00 and $5 billion.
So just an insane amount of profit basically if you got your
hands on a floor seat at face value, you could 10X relatively
quickly selling it on a secondary site.
So, and I guess the big one you probably know is is prestige.

(40:55):
Who they, they typically are able to buy hundreds of tickets
per second using bots. Just prestige.
And I guess Ticketmaster sued them and they ended up settling
out of court. And one of the stats too that
they said was in 2017, Prestige bought 40% of all Hamilton

(41:19):
tickets when Hamilton launched on Broadway.
I mean, just incredible stats. I just couldn't believe it when
I was reading this stuff. Crazy.
So if you if you don't mind, I'dlike just I have a few thoughts
and insights into this already. That's.
Exactly why I brought it up to you.
You're the expert. I guess let's, let's talk about

(41:40):
kind of the economics of scalping, right?
On one side, you've got the, thebuyers of the tickets, so the,
the, the companies that are buying them up using bots who
want to flip them and make a profit.
And you've got the fans who are getting basically pushed out of
the main on sale and have been forced to buy on secondary.
Then you've got the secondary sites that are allowing those

(42:01):
resellers to, to, to list and obviously charging fees on each
resale, which are, you know, they probably make as much as
the face value of the ticket just on the resale fees.
So they love being that marketplace, right?
Of course then the artists kind of gets told by their fans that,
you know, they're being, they'rebeing screwed over by the resale

(42:22):
marketplaces and you kind of like, well, why wouldn't like?
So we in 2014, we launched a face value only resale system
within our platform so that if you bought a ticket through the
system, you could just go into your account, hit sell, pick,
whether it was going to someone you knew or whether it was going
to a wait list for a sold out show.

(42:43):
And you were forced to name every ticket.
And if the promoter wanted to win to be anti scalping, they
could enforce the name on the ticket against the ID you show
at the door of the gig. And that is actually the
solution, right? And then you think, why doesn't
everyone do that? And then some people are
proponents of like, well, if it's a free market, like, you
know, someone owns something, they're they're they have the

(43:04):
right to sell it on, but actually they don't really own a
ticket. They own a license to enter the
venue, right? So they're, it's not really an
own, it's, it's they're owning permission to go into the gig.
So they don't really own the ticket.
So why should they be able to make money out of it?
B People go all that, you know, like the promoter should really
be able to benefit from the resale and they don't, which is
true. But then the other side of this,

(43:27):
which rarely gets considered, is, let's say that in this
scenario, right, the ticketing company was Ticketmaster, but
the promoter was actually AEG, who is a direct competitor of
Ticketmaster. They own access, they own their
own platform as well, but they picked Ticketmaster to be able
to handle the volume. So now you've got Live Nation
Ticketmaster as a service provider to one of their

(43:48):
competitors, AEG and AEG is likely taking a massive risk on
guarantees for Taylor Swift, right?
But they've they've agreed that they're going to pay these fees.
And this is like obviously on the highest scope, but any
promoter in contractors agreeingto pay their line up or their
talent a certain amount in termsof performance fees, the scalper

(44:09):
comes in and buys 40% or even 100% of the tickets that on
sale. They have just de risked the
promoter. And so it's not in the promotes.
They just basically generate allthe promoters revenue.
Now the promoters in profit, thepromoters sold out and it's the
scalpers problem to go and de risk themselves by selling them
on. And so the promoter who is

(44:34):
suffering scalping is completelyincentivized to allow it to
happen. Yeah, it's interesting.
That is an interesting. I've never heard that angle of
it, but that's an interesting angle because like again, if you
go back to Taylor Swift, so yes,in a sense the promoter was de
risked because all of those tickets sold out.
They were going to anyway. So in that particular.

(44:55):
So let's call that an anomaly. That's an edge case, right?
Taylor Swift is an edge case. Most bands are over here
somewhere where they don't sell out every venue or whatever,
but. I mean, it's not an education
thing that some promoters will intentionally scout their own
tickets because then they're notsubject to the split of the
tickets between them. Yeah, that makes sense.

(45:19):
So the artist gets screwed because like again, when they,
when they went over the economics of this Taylor Swift
thing, you know, and the total floor seats were 650 or $75,000
over the OR million, sorry, overthe entire tour or 5 billion
being sold on the secondary market, she didn't get any piece

(45:39):
of that, that spread between 6:50 and, and 5 billion.
And so in a sense, the artist gets screwed, not that she's
hurting for, for a meal or anything, but still, that's her
revenue basically that's being shared with a lot of other sort
of ecosystems out there. And Ticketmaster got screwed
because she wouldn't allow them to do any kind of, you know, the

(46:01):
dynamic pricing auction. And so the only people I guess,
who really won were the were thesecondary market, the brokers,
the scalpers, whatever. Yeah.
And The thing is the dynamic pricing increases the face
value. So that's to the benefit of the
promoter as well. Of course, yeah, the promoter,
the artist, certainly Ticketmaster, big time, they

(46:23):
make a lot more money. And so, yeah, I mean, there's an
argument for and against, I think the dynamic pricing.
But that particular case, the whole Taylor Swift thing
certainly is an argue for it. You know, it's an argue for it
because at least if she collected all that money, she'd
find a way to get it back to thefans perhaps or something.

(46:47):
I don't know. I don't know what I don't know.
You probably have some answers here right on how to solve
scalping. There is a it's a little
different for arena shows where like everything is seated.
If you've got something that's say 100,000 person festival and
those tickets start on Ted, there's Ted pricing and they
start with like, you know, they're the Super early birds

(47:08):
where they they are really low price nine months out and then
they go up in price over time. The economics are better if you
allow the ticket buyer or the fan to sell back into the
platform and get there early by refunded and you can then on
sell that ticket to whoever's onthe wait list for a sold out
show and they're paying the final, final release price.

(47:28):
And then what you've actually is, you've created a spread and
that spread is going to the promoter and the talent, not the
scalper. That's that's that's the ideal
economic solution for this. Yeah, but how would you do that
for most of the shows? Like OK, so that would work for
a festival, but how would that work for like an arena tour?
Yeah, it wouldn't unless the theseats go up over time and

(47:50):
they're repriced. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's tricky.
I mean, I guess the the one answer is really to force a a
system where you sit in the seatthat you bought through the
promoter and if you want to sellthat seat, you can only sell it
back to the promoter. Right, right.
And well, the platform can find you a buyer for someone who's

(48:11):
waiting for a seat of that classor that section or whatever it
is, right? Yeah.
And like the kind of that does happen now Ticketmaster reseller
like you know they they built their own internal closely
resell over the over the years. And so there is an element where
like they do have that now and it's good.
The only thing that's different to like, say, the way we do it

(48:32):
is that with us you're not allowed to make a profit and you
have to offer it for face value.Yeah, yeah, that's, I don't
know, you know, I believe in thefree market and stuff.
I just think that this has gone wild, you know, like other than
a, a child of a billionaire or something who can afford to pay
$60,000 for a pair of Taylor Swift tickets, you know, like
nobody can. There's just no normal person

(48:55):
out there that's going to pay $60,000, but there's somebody
who will pay it, you know. And I mean, I remember a long,
long time ago, I was, I provideda bunch of lighting for Brittany
when Brittany was huge and she opened her tour at The MGM in
Vegas. And I had for some reason 4
front row seats. And the day over, the day before

(49:19):
the the opening night, I got a call from the GM of The MGM
saying, you know, I understand you have 4 front row seats and
I'd like to offer you 4 seats anywhere else in the arena, plus
dinner, plus, you know, your entire stay while you're at the
hotel. Plus, I forget what else he
offered me because he had some billionaire flying in his

(49:44):
daughter and her three friends and they expected front row
seats and he was flying them in private just for this show.
And he wouldn't take no for an answer.
You know, they want to be front row and, and, and so yeah, I had
no problem take my seats. I'm all good with that.
I didn't really necessarily evenwant to be at the show except
from a work standpoint. But I would have looked a little

(50:04):
creepy sitting in the front row,like looking up at Brittany.
Anyways, so. So I was perfectly happy moving
back, but it was crazy that the the guy who runs the venue is is
calling asking me for my seats and.
Giving Yeah, here's the other the the viewpoint for this,
right? Like if you think about what you
what you said before, where people can't afford to pay

(50:26):
thousands of dollars or 10s of thousands of dollars for a
ticket. Once prices rise to even
hundreds of dollars, even like say 100 bucks, let's say that
was the cheapest ticket price for a gig, you've just priced
out the real fans, the people who are likely to have the most
energy in the crowd. Yeah, in favour of a bunch of
rich people who are just going to stand there looking bored.

(50:49):
Yeah, that's the unfortunate part of all of this is really
that, you know, it's it's very unfortunate, but how do you fix
it? Again, like the problem is, you
know, there is so much incentivefor all of the service providers
involved in that problem to not do anything about it.
And so how's it going to get fixed?

(51:09):
Gentrification of gigs is a realproblem.
Yeah. It's a real issue.
Like nightclubs going to table service.
I mean, it's unfathomable that someone can pay the average
person's or double the average person's monthly salary on a
table for one night. Yeah, it's incredible.
Like, it just feels immoral to me that that is even a culture.

(51:32):
Yeah. Like if you're celebrating
something, OK, cool, you've saved up.
Great. But like I I just don't believe
that segregation to entertainment is a good thing.
Yeah, I agree with you. Like when it becomes sort of an
elitist thing to go to a concert, you know, it's already
happened. Like, again, I, I think I told
you before, my son is a racing driver who's who's benched right

(51:56):
now basically because of cost, because it just came down to a
situation like we have a friend in IndyCar and I won't say the
name, but we have somebody that we're close with an IndyCar
whose father paid $40 million toget him into IndyCar.
You know, it's incredible. Like it's not even the top
racing league in the world, you know, Formula One is and Formula

(52:19):
One is hundreds of millions of dollars now to get someone into
Formula One, it's just an incredible amount of money to be
a racing driver and then let alone to go to races, which used
to basically be free. You could sit on the side of a
hill somewhere and watch it. And now it's it's just
incredibly expensive. And I just don't know where it

(52:41):
all ends. Like you're just going to end up
with no fans like you said, justpeople sitting still and not
cheering and just there so that they can post a picture on
Instagram or or whatever, right?Like, I mean it's.
It's, well, I mean, if you combine that with I guess like
foreign culture where people arenot really enjoying a gig and

(53:02):
they've just, they're just filming the gig while they're on
the dance. Floor, I know it's crazy, isn't
it? And.
Those two things combined are a real problem.
I so I, I threw my festival. So I do 2 festivals, 1 in Mexico
and one in Bali. They're both Dorman based that
ordered destination festivals. The crowd we get it's niche.

(53:22):
You know, it's 1000 to 1500 people a day.
It's not huge, but beautiful venues.
And this year one of my artists posted a video of the crowd and
she, she put a caption. What do you notice?
And I didn't know what she was trying to, trying to illustrate,
right? I was just like, it's, it's, I
booked every, every artist like I curate the music and it's a

(53:45):
crowd of people during one of the, one of the, the artists
that I booked and she captioned it.
What do you notice? And it took And then she screen
grabbed the, the responses and there were like 50 people that
replied saying no phones. And I looked at the video and I
was like, wow, there's no one with their phone out.
They're all dancing and smiling and they love it.

(54:06):
And A, I'm very proud of that, that crowd and the music was
curated to have that type of crowd.
But B, if someone has to point out that people are dancing and
that's unusual, that's a real problem.
Yeah, yeah. It really is incredible.
Like when you are looking at thestage and all you see is all
these, these phone screens, likein front of you there might, you

(54:29):
know, if you're 20 rows back there, there's probably 200
phones in front of you that you're looking at before you get
to the artist with your eyes, you know?
So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I like that so
much. You know, I, I, I've, I've
talked about it on this podcast before.
But Bon Jovi, one time I heard him on a talk show and he said

(54:49):
he was asked, you know, what's the problem with the music
business these days? And he said, well, one of the
problems is we've lost sort of the kinetic connection to music.
And he said, what do you mean? And he said, well, you know, for
example, when I was growing up, I used to go to the record store
and spend an entire day in the record store just thumbing
through albums and, yeah, looking at all the pictures and

(55:11):
all the song names. And you didn't even have
listening stations at this point, So you couldn't even
listen to the different songs onthe album.
You had to buy it for the one song that you heard on the
radio. And the rest was discovery.
And that discovery was incredible, you know?
That's nice. Think of how far we are from
that now. We're so far from that.
When I, when I first got into, into the drama bass scene, I, I

(55:35):
went to university in, in Bristol in the UK and it's got
very, very healthy music scene from electronic to, to other
genres. And like, you know, Massive
Attack comes from Bristol. Portis had come from Bristol.
There's a huge reggae scene and a huge alert bass music scene as
well. There were multiple record
shops. You, you basically on any given

(55:55):
day you would travel between multiple record shops to see
what had come in that day. And then like, you know, you'd
have the new releases and there'd be 3 copies of a white
label and two of them have been reserved for a regular customer.
And you're going, oh, what's in?Can I listen to it?
You know, you all, you knew which days there were, there'll
be new deliveries from the distributors.
And you know, you're, you're, you're desperately trying to

(56:17):
find new music or the new release from this new label.
And you know, not everyone couldhave that music and you'd have
early access because you'd got it right.
And that eye is lost now. Yeah.
Well, you know, so again, going way back when I used to have to
buy concert tickets, I lived in Canada at the time.
And in Canada they had the bass,I think it was called the bass

(56:41):
Ticket outlets were in Sears stores.
And so you had to go to like thecustomer service area in a Sears
store and there was a little bass window.
And if it was a big show, peoplewould camp out overnight outside
that Sears store to be first in line.
And you'd have a whole row of people camping all the way
around the building, you know. So a lot of times I'd wait a

(57:02):
couple hours in line to try and get the first, you know, 5 rows
or whatever. And it used to be where you
could. And then it got to where you
were the first or third person or fourth person in line and you
got like row 12 and you're like,what the heck?
And as I got into the industry 35 years ago, I started to learn

(57:24):
about promoter holds and about, you know, band guest lists and
all of these different things where then I was buying tickets
from, obviously, or, or getting tickets from.
But it makes you really feel forthat kid that's standing at the
front of the line, whether it's online or, or physically, right?
Walking away either empty handedor, or with less desirable seats

(57:48):
than he expected, having camped out overnight, right?
So. Yeah, it comes down to like
accessibility of gigs to normal people and like, you know,
everything we're talking about is, is all stems.
It comes back to that. And it's like, well, like the

(58:10):
the the issue I guess is like promoters.
Promoters are their own. They can take risks for only so
long and they can lose money foronly so long.
So they, they have to not have to, but they choose to go out
market to try and balance out that risk losses.
And then, you know, the artist gets big and they put up their
fees to unfeasible numbers. And I mean really, it's like,

(58:32):
well, now you have to charge 100bucks, 200 bucks, 300 bucks a
ticket because the artist is charging 200 grand for a DJ set
and 500 grand like it's it's you.
Know I, I was at AI was at a shed show, probably a, I don't
know, 18,000 seat shed in Florida.
And I was talking with the, witha Rep friend of mine, an AEG Rep

(58:55):
friend of mine. And I said, man, this is, this
is huge. You guys must be really earning
on this one, right? And he goes tell you what, turn
around. And I said what?
And he goes look at the grass. And I said, yeah, he says when
the lawn is full, we make X percent.
When the lawn isn't full, we either break even or lose money.
And I'm like, really like, that's your profit is the lawn

(59:17):
seats. And he said, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and I, I think a lot of people don't realize it's that
like that festival you got on the guest list for where there's
10,000 people in the field. The promo needed 15,000 just to
break even. Yeah, it's wild, isn't it?
It's wild. So I don't know, like, you know,
I don't mind when it's just the elite, you know, the very, very

(59:39):
top, top, top cream of the crop,like the Taylor Swift tour, you
know, OK, so it's gone batshit crazy.
People are willing to pay $30,000 for for floor seats.
Fine, let's put that over here. That's that edge case that we
talked about. But when it's so many shows,
like you wouldn't believe how many calls I get from people
saying, hey, can you get me tickets?

(59:59):
Cause. In our industry, 1520 years ago,
it was easy. I could get 20 tickets for any
show just by calling in a favor with somebody, right?
But now it's not like now it's really a job.
And so I just say no to everyone.
But occasionally somebody will say, you know, Chili Peppers are
here in a couple of weeks and I know their production manager

(01:00:20):
and their lighting guy and they're this guy and they're
that guy and you know, what do you need?
I need to and it's somebody I owe a favor to or whatever and I
might make the call, but it's amazing how much harder that has
become because of all of this stuff, right?
Because those tickets are gold. So like when it's that one elite
tour, like a like a Taylor Swiftor whatever, you don't mind so

(01:00:41):
much. It's sort of like the Super Bowl
in sports. Like I can get tickets for
almost anything, but the Super Bowls are really tough one.
And, you know, I've done halftime shows at the Super Bowl
and couldn't get tickets. So that's a tough ticket to get
unless you're willing to pay, you know, 3, four, $5000 for the

(01:01:02):
ticket. I hope regular concerts, I hope
regular bands don't get to that point, you know, where it's just
ridiculous. The biggest thing is that if the
promoter doesn't stay in business, nobody gets paid.
And that's kind of that was the driving factor in starting the
ticketing company was finding ways to unlock margin in a show

(01:01:27):
that wasn't obvious because there's always 5% here, 5%
there, 3%. If you can find ways to unlock
it, that is a way for the show. It's going to profit without
raising prices, without doing anything sketchy, without
scalping your own tickets. There are ways to do it if you

(01:01:50):
find the right tool kit, if you find the right methods.
And that's kind of what we got obsessed with.
It's like, you know, if you do that in 10 places, you've just
added 50% of the revenue. But an E thing is not
particularly remarkable or impactful, but them all
together, it's a really big deal.
Like if you think about it in the sense of, you know, the

(01:02:11):
promoter does need to stay in business.
If the promoter goes out of business, then what happens?
Like in Bled says it's a flagship festival that takes
place in, you know, some random town, right?
It could be like their main tourist attraction over the
course of the year. So our festival goes out of
business then hotels will suffer, the restaurants will

(01:02:33):
suffer, local economy suffers. Vendors don't get that booking
anymore. Or the freelancers who are going
to work at the gig, they don't get booked.
And so on and so on and so on. The artists don't have a show to
play. And so, like, that promoter is
more important than the artist. Yeah, they're taking all the
risk and they're at the bottom of the food chain.

(01:02:55):
And if they don't survive, it's a real problem.
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memories happen. Yeah, You know, I, I have a, a
good friend who's a, a small, he's not that small, but he's a,

(01:04:03):
he's an independent promoter of,you know, pretty mainstream
acts, but sort of on the smallerside.
And I mean, he's hurting right now.
Like he's just like, you know, it's so hard right now because
either the acts get overpaid by,you know, the big competitor
and, and taken into their venue when they really don't belong
there or, or, you know, the ACT just wants exorbitant amounts of

(01:04:26):
money now. And there's just no way to make,
make the math work on it. You know, you can't charge $250
to go see, you know, a fairly mediocre 70s or 80s act who
still thinks they're worth that kind of money.
So yeah, yeah. It's, it's strange.
So you started, I believe more from a tech standpoint, like you

(01:04:49):
had the need and that you were creating these, these small
festivals and stuff. And so you saw a need for a
better ticketing solution that was backed by like, all of your
digital tech knowledge. And yeah, I'm kind of tech
knowledge. I saw the need to build a
revenue platform rather than a ticketing platform.
Ticketing was the kind of museum, but it was more like

(01:05:10):
what revenue generating technology can can we build?
Yeah, yeah. And that's interesting because,
you know, ticketing itself, I guess is a pretty old school
thing. And I'm sure Live Nation has
probably added a ton of technology to Ticketmaster.
And I don't buy a lot of ticketsfrom Ticketmaster, so I don't
even really know much about the platform.

(01:05:33):
But just starting at it from a technology problem more so than
a ticketing problem, I think probably changes the entire
outlook. And that's sort of how I look at
my own businesses too. We were talking before we
started recording about AI, you know, 2 I, I own marketplaces
and two areas where a marketplace can really benefit

(01:05:56):
from AI. One is 1 is the search
experience and the other is basically the listing
experience, the listing and listing management experience.
So if you, you know, for example, whether it's eBay or,
or whatever it is any, any marketplace platform, if you
have AI helping you, especially if you're AB to B company,

(01:06:17):
you're a business who's listing hundreds of items, not one item.
Having AI technology to help youlist those items much more
quickly and help you manage those items and help you build
descriptions on those items and price those items and everything
else is a major, major win. And so without even getting into
ad tech and all of the other things data that, you know,
there's a lot of data plays you can make within a marketplace

(01:06:40):
sort of universe. And but just on the search and
and you know, just that connection front end and then
the listings back end are two incredible opportunities to
engage AI. Most definitely, Especially
because now there are multimodalmodels where like they can

(01:07:00):
actually analyze an image and figure out what's in it and
authorization and then try and defy what the item is like and
then pull that information from the training day or even the
broader web like that. That's a really big deal.
Yeah. I mean, so that was one of the
things we're building a new platform right now where we're

(01:07:20):
launching a new platform. It's pretty much 99% built, but
it launches in a couple of weeksand it's, it's the sharing
economy side of, of equipment basically.
So it's Airbnb of, of lighting, sound staging video equipment
from B to B. So it's, it's sub rentals
between large providers. And you know, that was one of

(01:07:41):
the things as we were building that we were just like most
companies would. We were using an API into
whether it was open AI or it wasDeepSeek for a minute or it was,
you know, whoever it was usuallytrying to optimize on cost
because we're not raising billions of dollars to go lose
giving out tokens to our users. But one thing we learned really

(01:08:03):
early on is, is that search results are a very unpredictable
thing when you're just using an API into ChatGPT.
And so we invested in building RAG servers and, you know, both
for the listing side and for thesearch side.
And suddenly things got a lot better.
You know, it was like, and the other thing that we were able to

(01:08:24):
do is even though we're not listing these items with a bunch
of features, you can search by feature and our Rag server is
able to connect you to items that are listed on the platform
based on features. So you could say I need
something that's got, you know, whatever and it would find

(01:08:45):
anything that has that, whatever.
And then it would look at what we've got for listings and match
you to those listings. Excuse me.
So, so yeah, it's been a real, you know, again, we didn't go
hire a bunch of AI coders or AI knowledgeable people.
We just went to our normal dev team and said, hey, go figure
this out. And so it was quite a learning
experience over six or seven months to build this thing.

(01:09:07):
But yeah, we got it done. It's pretty cool.
That's kind of what what I do without our engineering team.
It's kind of like I'll pre research a bunch of new
technology and then go right, this is what we're building and
here's all the APIs and tools that you can research off the,
you know, like as part of the the task and you're allowed to

(01:09:27):
override me if you find the bestsolution.
But here's a bunch of backgroundinformation and some something
you've never done before. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That makes a lot of sense. What about?
That like. With live events, you know, I
still think that there's so manyareas to not only improve the
experience, but to, to even further monetize those people

(01:09:49):
that are there at live events. Not into the ticket pricing or
anything else, but even just, you know, communicating with
people through my business partner has a platform where
he's able to connect to people'scell phones and control certain
things on their cell phones and stuff and be able to, it started
out as as almost like, you know,the wristbands where you could

(01:10:11):
change the color of the wristbands.
You can change the color of people's phone screens.
You can flash their flash at certain speeds.
You can play a sound. You can do all kinds of things
through their phones. But you can also do messaging,
whether it's for security or marketing purposes or whatever,
single one directional messagingto their phones without having
any Wi-Fi or any connection in the in the facility.

(01:10:32):
So where are some areas that youthink technology over the next
few years are going to play a role in sort of expanding or
improving live events? I think there's an under, I
guess like a misunderstood opportunity for the option for
AI within the event promoter side.
People are using it just for content generation at the moment

(01:10:55):
and that's really narrow minded in terms of where it actually
benefit event producers and venues.
We're doing a bunch of things onthat side of things as well,
because ultimately what you usually have, unless you're one
of the big guys is a very small core team.

(01:11:15):
If you're a venue, if you're a promoter, your full time staff
is going to be minimal. Everything else is Audi workers
and contractors, right. So how do you leverage AI to
give you the same or similar resources and leverage as the
big guys? So we're, we're putting a lot
focus into that because ultimately if you don't have

(01:11:38):
budget for 10/20/30 full time salaries, how are you going to
compete? Yeah, it forces you to be
smarter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So no, we're doing a. Yeah.
And so like, what are some examples that you can share that
aren't a proprietary or secret or whatever?
I mean, even just artist advancing where you know, you've

(01:11:59):
got you're booking 100 artists for a festival, like keeping on
top of all the emails, even to make sure when you haven't
missed something that's super critical, you haven't missed a
notification that someone's flight's been delayed.
You haven't missed their like, you know, the the tech writer

(01:12:21):
has changed things like that, right?
Like there's so many only so many hours in the day and only
so many resources you've got as especially pendant to keep track
of everything. And I realized I just cooking my
festival, you know, 75 artists flying in dedicated for that gig
and all the moving parts that come with that.

(01:12:42):
Everything is a bottleneck. Yeah, you know, it's
interesting. Just a few weeks ago I had Jake
Berry. I don't know if you know Jake,
probably not, but Big time Rock'n'roll production manager,
worked with the Stones and U2 and ACDC and blah, blah blah.
But he did the Aussie Black Sabbath farewell gig in in

(01:13:04):
Birmingham a few weeks ago and he was the, he was the
production manager and so much more.
But he was responsible for a lotof that coordination of all
these hundreds of artists who came in to do this thing,
getting them dressing rooms, making sure the dressing rooms
had what needed to be in those dressing rooms and, and making
sure that artists weren't freaking out because they didn't

(01:13:24):
have fancy things in their dressing rooms.
And coordinating all of these people were bringing their own
buses to the venue and stuff like where they had their own
like little VIP area that they could hang out in or whatever.
Organizing where to put all of those organizing their equipment
on stage and how to change out between bands.

(01:13:45):
Because the change time was so short, because Ozzy could only
spend so much time there. He was obviously in in rough
shape. You know, he he couldn't be
there for 12 hours or something waiting for artists in between
shows. Yeah.
I mean, the coordination side ofthings was just a massive
undertaking. Right, and that is often 5
people's work, but usually you've only got the budget for

(01:14:07):
two, so things will slip. Yeah, yeah, that's that's
interesting. So what do you think going
forward? Like what's going to destroy
concert touring? What do you see as being some of
the challenges that we face thatwe may not even know that we're
we're facing right now when it comes to live shows or concert

(01:14:30):
touring? You know, anything safety,
security, environmental, you know, whatever it is.
I think the biggest there's, there's two major issues that I
think are going to be the most impactful. 1 is that people who
do still go to shows kind of growing out of it or they're no
longer going out or they've now got families and they've decided

(01:14:52):
that like instead of going out five nights a week, they're
doing it once every six months. You've got Gen.
Z that does not really leave thehouse and doesn't go out.
So you've got 2 revenue loss on both ends of the spectrum.
And then you've got the global trend right now, which is almost

(01:15:15):
all ticket buying, unless it's like a Taylor Swift esque super
hot tour. Everyone is leaving ticket by
buying tickets to a gig until month of show, week of show, day
of show. And often 50% of the sales for a
gig come on the day of the gig. And that is folding a bunch of
promoters at the moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(01:15:37):
That's got to kill a promoter. I can't imagine 50% of your
revenue come in the day of, you know, like, yeah, a heart
attack. And that's a heart attack, you
know? Yeah, even if you had the money
to pay for expenses, you're right, it's a heart attack.
It's the stress and the unknown factor.
You're putting so much money into extra marketing and you're
cutting things here. And just because people just

(01:15:59):
decided to be not lazy because lazy is the wrong word.
Circumstances have led to peopleleaving things to the last
minute for various reasons. Sometimes because when they
bought a show a ticket to a showearly, the show got cancelled
and they didn't get their money back, so they're more cautious.
Sometimes there's a lot of moneyto pay their power bills, so how
could they spend money on a concert ticket until they

(01:16:20):
absolutely have to? Yeah, yeah.
That's, and I think it's all in parallel with rising artist
fees, rising insurance costs, just affordability is going out
the window. So like, it's a it's a perfect
disaster, really. Yeah, which is very.
Depressing. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, I'm sure you you saw all the stuff that

(01:16:41):
happened with Tomorrowland with the the pyro catching the stage
on fire and and almost ending the show, like almost ended the
event. It didn't happen.
Almost. Right.
And that is a well oiled machine, right?
That's a well oiled machine. Well oiled machine that's super
well funded and just that one thing could have ended it.
Well, and because they're a welloiled machine and super well

(01:17:05):
funded, they were able to go on.But if if they were just some
regular schmo doing a really cool EDM festival in the middle
of a field or something and thathappened, that's over.
And now you've spent all the money and you got to give people
back their their ticket price. A personal anecdote, my festival
that I did, which was mid June, so exactly 2 months ago, two

(01:17:27):
days before the festival happened and we have a 80 to 90%
international audience that fly in from other countries into
Bali. So they come from Australia,
they come from New Zealand, theycome from Singapore and then
other other countries in Southeast Asia.
Two days before the gig, a volcano erupted in Indonesia.

(01:17:48):
It didn't cause any damage but spewed a bunch of ash into the
air and a couple of hours later I started getting text messages
saying my artist flight's been cancelled and the airlines
cancelled every flight out of Australia, New Zealand and
Singapore into Bali 2 days before my gig.
Every single flight. How'd that work?

(01:18:12):
It was not. It was not fun.
Our crowd is so passionate aboutthe gig and the music that they
spend. Some people spend.
These are ticket buyers spent 1000 to $2000 on rerouting
themselves through other countries or buying new flights
to get to the gig. Wow, so.

(01:18:34):
But you. Didn't end up we lost to.
Give a ton of refunds or just wedidn't?
We didn't have to. We didn't have to give any
refunds. Oh wow.
People found themselves, they found a way to the gig, but what
it did do is massively impact the attendance because people
that didn't have tickets yet, who then couldn't, who hadn't

(01:18:56):
committed because they were going to buy when they got on to
got got to got to Bali, they didn't have that, I guess, like
sunken cost, right? And then there were people that
basically had saved up to buy their flights to buy their
hotels and whatever. And then they couldn't spend
another, another grand to buy new flights.

(01:19:17):
And so you know, they didn't come.
Wow, Yeah, it's, it's a tough business, man.
When you get down to that level,you know, like, again, if you're
Taylor Swift, you you postpone it and pick a new date and you,
you do it then for local promoter, you know, that kind of
a show, 1500 people, whatever. It's a whole different ball

(01:19:39):
game. It's, it's brutal, right?
And, and especially if you thinkabout it, there was 75 or so
artists. I had a 20 piece orchestra
flying in from Europe. Right.
And imagine the skepticism of a ticket buyer whose or a
potential ticket buyer whose flight gets cancelled, looking
at the volcano erupting nationwide, flights being

(01:20:00):
cancelled, and then thinking, you know what, none of the
artists are going to show, so why would I even bother trying
to get there? Yeah, yeah.
So did that increase your cost as well?
Because now you had to pay to get the artists in and stuff?
We were fortunate we managed to get everyone there without
paying any extra. It was, yeah, there was some
juggling. There was some.
Juggling that you still we're able to put the thing on, you

(01:20:20):
know, like that to me, it says alot.
But wow, that's that's that's nofun at all.
So let me ask you this like, youknow, you're now what, almost 15
years into it, right, the ticketbusiness?
On the team side, yeah. So we've, we've sold well over
$300 million worth of tickets through the platform now.

(01:20:41):
Wow, that's a big number. What station?
It's the big guys, but it's all right.
Yeah. You know, based on the fact that
things were probably different 15 years ago and, you know, the
the situation you were stepping into was different.
Concert touring was different, politics were different, the
economy was different, everything was different.

(01:21:02):
Would you do it again today? Would I do it again today?
I would. I would definitely do it again
today, knowing how important it is to keep the industry alive.
I think that building the tech company came from a real, I
guess like love gigs and just the, the industry in general,

(01:21:24):
because ultimately, like I'm a raver and when it really comes
down to it, that's what I love. I, I want to go to shows, I want
to push new, I want to push new music, I want to discover new
music. And if there are people that
share that same passion and I can build a toolkit for those
people to be successful financially, yeah, of course I
do it again. That's amazing.

(01:21:45):
Well, Ritesh, I got a jump. I appreciate you coming and
doing this. You actually reached out to me.
I love it. I, you know, a lot of times when
people reach out to me, a lot oftimes they come in through
agencies or whatever and, and you know, using some kind of AI
search thing and they connect usand I look at them and I go, I
just don't have an audience for you, but I think my audience is
going to find this really interesting.

(01:22:05):
So I really appreciate you doingit.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Yeah, All right. Well, have an amazing day.
Yeah, you too.

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#324 - Ritesh Patel - The Economics of Live Events

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#324 - Ritesh Patel - The Economics of Live Events