As the ticketing industry continues to evolve, there is no sign of the pace of change slowing down. In this second segment of our series, we dive further into the key trends expected to redefine the future of ticketing and live events this year and further down the road. Experts and thought leaders share their predictions on emerging technologies, maximizing revenue, fraud prevention, offering even more flexible solutions for attendees, and more. These shifts represent a broader effort to meet patrons’ rising expectations while tackling the hurdles ticket offices, venues and event organizers face.
Innovation is at the forefront, from ultra-flexible subscription plans to advanced mobile ticketing and wider distribution options. As the industry continues to prioritize inclusivity, sustainability and long-term financial health, there is also an increased emphasis on accessibility and attracting top talent to ticketing. In the second installment of our three-part series, we explore trends 7 through 15, highlighting how more key trends are shaping the future in 2024 and beyond.
If you haven’t read part one yet, you can view it here.
- Maximizing Attendee Revenue
Mike Geller
Loyalty models continue to struggle, and while ticket prices are higher and capacities are selling well, ticket prices have not kept up with inflation. Indeed, it is harder to find loyal patrons who attend performances eight or 10 times a year. Instead, people may come to one, two or three performances annually. Maximizing revenue ultimately comes back to your customer relationship management (CRM) system. President of Spektrix, Mike Geller, predicts that more organizations will leverage their power to benefit the bottom line.
“What we are looking at in terms of all of our integrated partners are things like how much people, even if they are single ticket buyers and they are just coming once, are eating at the restaurant, are they buying at the bar, are they buying at the gift shop? Are the people that they are bringing participating in all these things? Are they connecting through your guest Wi-Fi in the venue? Are you capturing who their guests are and adding them to your mailing list and so forth? We always talk about this holistic view of patrons, but I think that often gets limited to how much they spend on tickets and how much they donate,” Geller says. “There is so much more happening revenue-wise in your venue, depending on the size of the venue and what else you offer, that without these other data pieces, you really are not able to maximize the interaction with these patrons when they attend, and therefore you're not able to maximize your revenue.”
He adds, “Examples [to maximize revenue] might be someone buying a single ticket for this year. They have attended once in the past. When they attended, they ate at the restaurant or got snacks and drinks from the bar, so how do you pre-empt that this time in a personalized way? Maybe it is prompting them to make a reservation in the restaurant. Maybe it is offering a discount at the restaurant or the concession stand, etc., so it is just really getting hyper-personalized but in a way that maximizes revenue and pushes them toward wanting to spend more.”
- Ultra-Flexible Subscriptions
Today’s customers want extreme flexibility that goes beyond building your own package. They will commit revenue upfront, but they don’t have to choose dates and seats just yet.
“Ultra flexibility is what we really feel is the right approach that keeps the revenue coming in early but ultimately appeals to a wider demographic of patrons,” Geller says. “It's a voucher system [that] we support and ultimately envision. You are committing the revenue upfront because I am offering you a package of things. There could be food and drink and shows, or it could just be shows, but I am happy to do that. It's an easy decision because you're not asking me to commit to you on my calendar right now, and when I'm going to be able to make it, and with how many people and what seat I want to sit in and so forth.”
Geller continues, “This is an analogy, not actually the restaurant at the venue, but if I buy a gift certificate for a restaurant, the last thing I want to do is have to reserve what night I am going to come to dinner there. I want the gift certificate for my friends so they can go whenever they want and spend $100 or $200 the way they want. Whether that is two meals, great. If it's one meal, great. So again, flexibility. Do I have one voucher for a ticket to the show, or can it be I bought a five-pack called a flex pass, and I can use up to all five of those tickets for one show, or I can only use one for five shows? It's how far you are willing to go with flexibility for your patrons to make it easy for them to want to invest early with you.”
Crystal Brewe
- Combatting Fraud
“We are watching how others are combating the various bad actors perpetuating fraudulent activity by selling tickets that were purchased with a stolen credit card,” Crystal Brewe, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing and Audience Experience Officer for Ensemble Arts Philly, says. “This has become a game of whack-a-mole for many of us. We have had to devote significant resources to identifying trends, cancelling ticket orders, and then handling the unaware ticket buyers who show up thinking they purchased a legitimate ticket.”
Michael McDermott
“There are several threat points from purchasing, paying, and gaining access that need new approaches to combat,” he says. “We will continue to innovate our technologies and partner with industry leaders to further reduce the risk in these areas. To date, we have been able to identify and mitigate the attacks with some of the world’s leading cultural arts, attractions, sports and live entertainment customers of ours.”
When it comes to enhanced fraud detection and mitigation, Michael McDermott, General Manager of the Americas for SECUTIX, says the ability to identify and deter bad actors from the purchase and resale market is something the industry is attacking.
Michel Blanchet, Director of Ticketing and Client Services for F1 Grand Prix du Canada, emphasizes the necessity of technological advancements to combat all forms of fraud. With rising incidents impacting venues, producers, ticketing providers and, most importantly, the customers, addressing this issue has become imperative.
Michel Blanchet
“Fraud is a large term that [includes] bots, scammers, fake accounts or false personas and … unauthorized and illegal use [of credit cards]. This causes problems in the whole event process, from the beginning of the ticket sales to the event itself, [and] even after for chargebacks,” he says.
Blanchet continues, “The technology systems (ticketing and payment) will need to improve their chemistry and process (verification and authentication) to help with this. There also needs to be effective monitoring of transactions and patterns to act as soon as possible. Tools and analysis will be essential, as well as good teamwork between ticketing providers and venues.”
He says, “At the Formula 1 Grand Prix du Canada, we started analyzing purchase patterns in 2023–2024, and we can already confirm that we are able to detect suspicious accounts and block sales. In the end, this allows real customers to get valid tickets at normal prices. [It is] a win-win situation.”
- Advanced Mobile Ticketing
According to McDermott, the top trend over the next year will be advancing mobile ticketing to streamline the user experience — from purchase and resale to improving entry.
“This will further connect the rights holders directly to their fans and reduce the need for ticket distribution platforms,” he predicts, adding that several new product initiatives will transform the industry to support this trend.
Martin Gammeltoft
- More Open Distribution Options
Martin Gammeltoft, Chief Business Officer for Activity Stream, says an evolving landscape is being shaped by innovative solutions that enhance primary and secondary distribution.
“New players like Project Admission are enabling venues and teams [to achieve] new ways of putting tickets on sale, and distribution networks like Logitix are making it easy to list tickets on all major secondary platforms, resulting in a further blend of primary and secondary markets,” he says.
Mike Garvie, CEO of Prolific 1, says organizations are making use of integrations to primary ticketing platforms to place inventory directly on secondary distribution channels.
Mike Garvie
“[They are] trying to utilize secondary to get all the distribution and get their tickets in front of all the people who are shopping these days. [They want to] do it in the right manner, where pricing is … more of a unified approach to where what's on the primary is the exact same price you are seeing on the secondary, the same tickets that you're seeing on the primary, you are seeing on the secondary, just making it so it's more of an aligned process. [It is] the exact same things in all these different places, so customers are getting … the same experience, the same options to purchase and not at different prices.”
Garvie adds, “The biggest thing we are also seeing, especially over the course of the last two to three years, is that consumers are starting to become a little bit more brand loyal, even on the secondary, where before it used to be a lot of just shopping on the desktop, putting in a Google search looking for things, where now people are shopping on their phones, and if they put an app on their phones, whether it be for StubHub or Vivid Seats or SeatGeek, and they had a good experience the first time, they are going back to that. They are seeing what options exist there, and they're utilizing potentially their customer loyalty points or [other] things to shop in that place.”
Ultimately, primary and secondary are learning how to live and partner with each other to stabilize the market and provide the best experience for end customers.
- Unified Approach to Achieving Event Budgets
Garvie predicts that more organizations will start establishing budgets that they want to achieve and that it will matter less whether the tickets are selling on primary or secondary and more that they sold for the right price to the right people.
“What we are starting to do with some of our team, league, and venue partners is to say, ‘What is the budget for the event? How many tickets are you trying to sell? What is the overall revenue number you are trying to achieve? Let's work together with one single budget that we're both working toward’ … [If] we want to target $1 million in revenue, at the end of the day, if the primary sell is $400,000 and we sell $600,000, we achieved the overall goal, and we worked together to get there.”
Josh Ziegenbusch
- Accessibility
“A trend that I see taking on more of a focus is accessibility. We, as venue owners and operators, have both a responsibility and expectation to meet the needs of all of our customers,” Josh Ziegenbusch, Senior Director of Service and Retention for the Oakland Athletics and Chair of the INTIX Board of Directors, says. “[We must take] ownership of our buildings, collateral and communications to ensure all customers have access to the ticketing inventory, experiences, concessions and seating areas to be inclusive for all to enjoy.”
- Sustainability
Another trend that Ziegenbusch is monitoring is sustainability.
“At the Seattle INTIX conference, Kraken staff shared the lengths they had taken to be more environmentally conscious … Using rainwater for the playing surface [and] providing a complimentary mass transportation pass along with ticket purchase are great examples of the responsibility that venues have to be mindful of the environmental footprint we have and leading as an example in our respective communities. I think fans expect this level of responsibility from their local entertainment outlets and a focus for venues moving forward.”
- Attracting Talent to Ticketing
“It is getting harder and harder to keep people working in this industry, as everybody is experiencing,” Geller says. “Most of our clients are nonprofits, performing arts or live entertainment … Turnover is continuing. It was not just a COVID thing. It's hard to find talent that wants to work, and it's hard to find talent that wants to stay. Part of that might be because a lot of the work is on-premises and not remote, or part of it could be the pay. There are so many things. So, the key here that we see is we need to be able to reach outside of the ticketing sector, so to speak, and bring in great talent from other industries. To do that, we have to make sure that our technology, the software that's being used to sell these tickets and bring in these donations, can't be the barrier to great talent coming in from outside the sector. Specifically, the software has to be very intuitive, very easy to use, very trainable and teachable, similar to systems they may use if they're working as a host or hostess at a restaurant or in a retail store.”
In the final installment of our 2024 ticket trends series, experts will discuss personalization, ticket purchase transparency, the most popular event types, dynamic pricing, market shifts, last-minute ticket purchases and event cancellations, installment and group payment models and more.
You May Also Like
Want news like this delivered to your inbox weekly? Subscribe to the Access Weekly newsletter, your ticket to industry excellence.