As new technology continues to help lower the entry barriers to the international ticketing markets, Richard Smirke examines the ever evolving self-service and DIY ticketing sector and some of the companies, established and start-up, looking to provide solutions to its expanding client base
SELFSERVICE & DIY TICKETING
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0 years ago, promoters and event organisers had relatively few options when it came to ticketing, with just a handful of companies, led by Ticketmaster in the US, dominating the sector, and firmly established channels of inventory, distribution and sales in place for concerts big and small. Today, Ticketmaster still reigns supreme as the world’s biggest ticket vendor (while CTS Eventim is the market leader in Europe),
but there also exists an ever-expanding wealth of self-service, do-it-yourself and white-label business-to-business (B2B) companies available for promoters to utilise and tailor to their own ticketing needs. “The delineation between self-service and managed events, fully inclusive of any size or shape, has become smaller and smaller as the market has evolved,” says Marino Fresch, UK & Ireland marketing director of San Francisco-based Eventbrite, which prides itself on being the world’s
8 • INTERNATIONAL TICKETING YEARBOOK 2017
largest event technology platform and processes 3 million tickets per week across over 180 countries and had 50 million active buyers last year. “The advantage that self-service brings is that an event organiser of any size, from the very small to the very large, can make their show exactly as they want it. They can control every aspect of the ticketing and data experience, and understand what’s working by seeing that information in real time. That’s where the self-service business