Copyright © 2012 Ticketfly, Inc.
November 13, 2009
Ticketfly founders Andrew Dreskin & Dan Teree were interviewed and featured in an article in the New York Times about the newest crop of ticketing companies. Pretty fly! See the full article below or read it on nytimes.com.
By BEN SISARIO
Nothing in the concert industry has evolved more significantly than how people buy tickets, from the days of walk-up box offices to Ticketmaster’s network of call centers to the almost entirely Internet-based technology of today, in which seats by the thousands can disappear in an instant.
But Andrew Dreskin, a concert promoter and music entrepreneur, thinks the technological evolution is stuck in the ways of Web 1.0, and needs to move to the next phase.
“Ticketing doesn’t seem to have really changed all that much in the past decade,” Mr. Dreskin said. “The software today seems to do mostly what it did in 1997, ’98, ’99,” he added, pointing to the plain, text-heavy design of most ticketing sites and consumers’ limited control over basic aspects like seating choice.
In response, he has helped found Ticketfly, one of several tech-heavy young companies working to bring ticketing into the social-networking age. With Ticketmaster’s proposed merger with the concert giant Live Nation tensing stomachs throughout the music business, Ticketfly (Ticketfly.com) has set itself up as a boutique alternative for clubs and smaller theaters, and in the last year it has signed deals with clubs across the country, including the Knitting Factory’s growing chain, the Double Door in Chicago, Bimbo’s 365 in San Francisco and Brooklyn Bowl.
This week it picked up a big client: the 9:30 Club in Washington, which won top club this year in the nationwide Billboard Touring Awards. Seth Hurwitz, the club’s owner, said that Ticketfly’s advantages are its size and flexibility.
“They’re not Home Depot — they’re the hardware store that specializes in tools,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “Smaller companies are nimbler. They can concentrate on our unique demands and issues as opposed to hiding behind quote-unquote company policy, like the big companies do.”
Those special demands, as Mr. Dreskin sees it, involve streamlined operations and an array of Web marketing tools for promoters. In addition to doing Brooklyn Bowl’s ticketing, Ticketfly built its Web site, brooklynbowl.com, and the company’s software will allow clubs to spread information about their offerings to Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, where fans can chat about shows, make plans to meet up and buy tickets with a quick click.
“The needs of a club promoter are different than the needs of a professional sports team,” Mr. Dreskin said in an interview this week at his Lower Manhattan office, a small leased room within the headquarters of Spin magazine, with framed concert posters still waiting to be hung. “Teams are focused on season tickets, big theater groups are focused on subscriptions, that kind of stuff. We are really focused on viral social-marketing technology that will allow music venues and promoters to sell tickets.”
Since ticket selling has migrated online, the barriers for entry into this business have been vastly reduced. No longer must a company employ hundreds of telephone operators or maintain large numbers of retail outlets; the only requirement, promoters and ticketers say, is a better computerized mousetrap. Dan Teree, who founded Ticketfly with Mr. Dreskin, said their company uses the same high-powered software as major hedge funds, and it allows them to “sell massive numbers of tickets in a short amount of time.”
Mr. Dreskin, 40, is no stranger to the strategies of Internet ticketing. In 1995 he was one of the founders of TicketWeb, a pioneering service that sold its first online ticket a full year before Ticketmaster did; in 2000 it was bought by Ticketmaster for $35 million, and Mr. Dreskin, who speaks with the steady, deliberate enunciation of a high school guidance counselor, eventually went on to promote the American edition of the Virgin Mobile festival, in Maryland.
He and Mr. Teree, another TicketWeb vet, started Ticketfly last year and began selling tickets in June. The company has 14 employees in three cities and contracts with 15 clubs and promoters, which will account for an expected 700,000 tickets a year, they said.
In recent years ticket startups have proliferated, many with a focus on social networking. Tom Higley, a dot-com entrepreneur in Boulder, Colo., now runs Iggli (iggli.com), whose namesake product is a Web widget that allows fans to invite friends to events and manage details like how many tickets to buy and who among the invited will pay.
“Events are social by their nature,” Mr. Higley said. “People will actively click a link and buy a ticket when prompted by a friend or acquaintance, versus the same info sent from a venue or a team or an artist. That higher conversion rate is very interesting to people in the ticketed-event industry.”
Front Gate Tickets, based in Austin, Tex., is partly owned by one of the promoters behind C3 Presents, which puts on the Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza festivals, as well as hundreds of club shows. Front Gate sells two million tickets a year, and this month it will start selling by cellphone, according to Jack McCarty, its general manager.
These companies are far eclipsed by Ticketmaster, which last year sold 141 million tickets worth $8.9 billion. But many in the concert industry say that if the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger — which is now clearing government antitrust hurdles — becomes a reality, some promoters and theaters will want to look elsewhere for a ticketing service. That is because Live Nation is the largest concert promoter in the world, and some impresarios worry about giving it access to confidential sales information.
As Peter Shapiro of Brooklyn Bowl put it, “Why would I sign up for Ticketmaster ticketing, with Live Nation as my competitor?”
For fans, though, the biggest question about any kind of ticketing is simply the fees they have to pay, which have skyrocketed in recent years. Ticketing used to be another line item expense for the promoter, part of the cost of doing a show, said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, a concert industry trade magazine. Now theaters and ticketers split the audiences’ fees.
“Today it is a profit center,” Mr. Bongiovanni said. “That’s why those fees are so high.”
Ticketfly has supplemental charges, like every ticketer, and lives off that money. “We’re like a marketing company that happens to make the bulk of our revenue through service fees,” Mr. Teree said.
Mr. Dreskin said that his company gave clubs the ability to keep the fees relatively low for fans. “Our goal is to offer reasonable fees and to offer clients and consumers more,” he said.
When fans complained on the 9:30 Club Web site, 930.com, about continued fees when it started phasing in Ticketfly, Mr. Hurwitz answered that the charges were no higher than they were before.
“This was NOT done to lower service charges,” he wrote of the switch. “It was done to start working with a company that has a lot of cool ideas.”
Categories: News
November 09, 2009
Ticketfly is thrilled to welcome Washington DC’s preeminent music venue, 9:30 Club! Details in the press release below:
Mon, Nov 9th 2009 1:06 pm EST
PRESS RELEASE: “I.M.P. SELECTS NEW TICKET PROVIDER, TICKETFLY, FOR THE 9:30 CLUB”
WASHINGTON, D.C. (I.M.P.; Ticketfly) November 9, 2009 – The 9:30 Club, which once again just won Billboard’s coveted national honor of Club of the Year Award, announced today that it will use a new online ticketing and marketing provider. I.M.P., one of the nation’s preeminent independent concert promoters has selected Ticketfly to sell tickets for 9:30 Club shows scheduled to take place after January 1, 2010.
Ticketfly is exclusively focused on live music promotion, and plans to create an online community where customers not only buy tickets efficiently, but also discover new artists and events and share event-related experiences. In addition to show information, Ticketfly’s Event page will feature artist images, bios, streaming audio and video links and artist website and social media links. The pages integrate with Facebook and Twitter, allowing consumers to seamlessly invite their friends to concerts through their social networks. Ticketfly is headed by former senior management of TicketWeb, the Internet’s first ticketing company.
“The guys at Ticketfly have proven to be innovators and they’re on to something here,” said Seth Hurwitz, chairman of I.M.P. and owner of the 9:30 Club. “The bottom line is we think it will be more fun for our customers. For years it has just been more of the same in the ticketing space, but this is different. They are creating unique tools and a better experience for our ticket buyers,”
“Although they are obviously a newer company with less volume and they’re investing huge sums on technology, Ticketfly made the commitment to not raise charges,” said Hurwitz. “But as usual customers have options. There are never any service fees when you buy at the door on show night, and only $1 per ticket when you buy in advance at the box office.”
Ticketfly is the brainchild of Andrew Dreskin and Dan Teree, respectively the co-founder/former CEO and former President of TicketWeb, the first company to sell event tickets via the Internet. “We’ve worked with Andrew over many years and he’s clearly a visionary and a businessperson who shares our standards of integrity,” said Hurwitz. In addition to the 9:30 Club, Ticketfly is now serving popular venues in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and other US markets, and is expanding quickly across the country.
“It’s remarkable how little online ticketing has changed in the past decade, “ said Dreskin. “Our integrated ticketing, website and marketing platform streamlines daily life for concert promoters. We address their repetitive and time-consuming daily tasks so that they are now able to focus their energies on more important initiatives.” Teree went on to say, “Ticketfly aims to give promoters and fans relevant technologies that will enhance the already social aspect of seeing a live show. We’re really listening to our clients and the fans to determine how best to use the latest web and mobile goodies and to have a lot more fun.”
ABOUT I.M.P.
Formed in 1980, I.M.P., is a Bethesda, Md.-based concert promoter and event production company. In addition to launching the Virgin Festival in the U.S., the principals at I.M.P. own Washington DC’s legendary 9:30 club, renowned as the premier place to see and hear cutting edge live music of all varieties. I.M.P. also programs and operates Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD. Over the last 29 years, I.M.P. and the 9:30 club have put on nearly 10,000 events, hosting millions of music fans.
ABOUT Ticketfly
Ticketfly is a new company from the co-founder and former senior management of TicketWeb, the first company in the world to sell event tickets on the Internet. Ticketfly is an online ticketing and marketing platform for music promoters that increases efficiency and offers next-generation ticketing, website and social marketing tools. Ticketfly offers promoters free website development tools and is the first ticketing company to have built a WordPress plug-in specifically geared to the live music industry. Ticketfly clients also gain access to integrated Facebook Event creation and Twitter tools to make sure their events are being seen and heard on the most ubiquitous social platforms today. For fans, Ticketfly’s goal is to offer an online destination where fans engage around live music experiences and easily communicate with their friends about the artists and events they love. Ticketfly’s clients include the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C., Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco, Troubadour in Los Angeles, Brooklyn Bowl in New York City and Knitting Factory venues nationwide.
Contact:
Audrey Fix Schaefer
Audrey@schaefer.com, 301-947-1133
Categories: News, Ticketfly Clients
Copyright © 2012 Ticketfly, Inc.