#324 - Ritesh Patel - The Economics of Live Events

0:00 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 that wasn't obvious because there's always 5% here, 5% there, 3% there. 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 obsessed with. It's like, you know, if you do that in 10 places, you've just added 50% of the revenue.

0:49 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 joining me today on I don't know the 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.

1:47 And this was based actually on a conversation that I had on one 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 and old stories and stuff like that. Like kind of like almost like geezers of gear, but live in a, 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 ideas for very long.

2:27 I jump into them and, and create some sort of a business or a foundation around that idea. And so that's what we did. 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 would tag on with LDIA, very successful trade show that I've been going to myself for over 30 years. Jeez. And so we contacted or I contacted LDI, my friends at LDI and said, hey, we've got this idea. And they were blown away.

3:12 They loved the idea. I thought they were going to be offended dining with dinosaurs. And they loved it. 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 to have 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 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.

3:57 And again, we didn't know what we were doing. It was a little sloppy. But lo and behold, people showed 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 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 big differences is, first of all, LDI is 100% behind it. Secondly, we had a lot of time to plan. So we actually started I think in around May or June to plan for this year.

4:46 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 know what my role is going to be the 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 different topics in concert touring. We're not really getting involved much in, you know, the health and the, you know, all of the 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 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 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

6:19 start until Sunday. So instead of starting on Thursday like it has for so many years, the show starts on Sunday now and the show will go, I'm sorry, on Saturday is going to 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 going to have drinks with it. So it's going to be dining and drinking with dinosaurs. And of course, you don't have to drink. 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 thing down 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, people walking around with trays of 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.

7:31 And so you can eat and have a drink and talk with some incredible people. And I've got a list of the 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, 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 or whatever.

8:17 And but LDI has managed to to get it down to, I think it's one O 9 right now, but it goes up at some point soon because the early bird deal is one O 9. And I think it goes up to 129. And then eventually, like at the time 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. 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.

8:57 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 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 of cool 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 annual event where every year we open the show with these two events on the Saturday before the show. So that is Dining with Dinosaurs and X Live.

9:38 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 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 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.

10:23 And it was about ticketing in our industry and just sort of the problems with ticketing and with Ticketmaster and with all 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 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 like that 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 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 platform helping events and venues grow revenue, cut risk and fight scalping, which will be a great conversation today. He's also the founder of Locust, a destination drum and bass festival in Mexico and Bali.

11:41 With over 20 years in live, live entertainment and a background in tech, Ritesh combines creative and technical expertise to solve the toughest challenges facing event producers today. His motto? Leave the house and good things happen. So please join me and welcome 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 only am 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 talking about sound tech or lighting tech or whatever.

12:24 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 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, which is notoriously one of the hardest scenes to make any money from whatsoever, yeah. I can imagine. You know, it's like the Super underground gigs, low ticket prices, you're especially if you're breaking new talent, like you know, it's it's a lose, losing scenario for two out of three gigs.

13:12 And so like, you know, like any promoter who does stuff in either in the first few years or just 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 started building software during high 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 over like a decade basically did two things in parallel, throwing gigs and then working in tech. So yeah, it's definitely been like, I think at one point I was sleeping 2 hours a night.

14:00 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 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 cultures sort of connect, I guess. There is a commonality I've I've. I've only really just figured it out.

14:42 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 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 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 major labels that were super on it drop it.

15:41 And because it's no longer the core thing. And in the periods of time where it's popular, it does end up you can do big gigs, but only in the kind 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 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, 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.

16:33 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. 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. 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 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.

17:45 So like I still in Australia in I think 2009 and they had two 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 on the right and, and it was like, OK, well I went there for Bjork and I was loving it. 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.

18:26 No, but again, even Metallica alongside EDM acts is just, I mean, I guess Metallica is a lot more mainstream now than they were in the 80s or whatever, but it's still very strange to me 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 members of pendulum came from a like rock, punk, metal background. And So what they ended up doing 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 kind of metal punk energy to that gig. And you would never think that it's an electronic music show. Interesting.

19:24 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 Country artists and they tend to bring 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 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.

20:13 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 has mastered the art of lighting, audio and video in high energy live settings from iconic music festivals to global tours, corporate launches, award shows, sporting events and beyond. For Delicate, the only way to get it right is to get it just right. With precision, creativity and full service production capabilities, they turn bold visions into moments that linger in pop culture's subconscious. Need a single touring partner to handle audio, lighting, video, rigging and production design?

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22:00 You see, I had this conversation literally 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. 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 beach venues in Mexico as a client.

22:45 There was this kind of I guess you know how it goes once you've been a promoter, you're always a promoter like, you know, even if you've lost loads of money doing it, you always, you know, you walk into a field or a warehouse or some random space and you're like, oh, I could throw a really cool party here. And the kind of that that happened and I and I approached one of the venues, I was one of our ticketing clients and I was like, hey, there is a big gap in the 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 them to even understand what I wanted to do.

23:27 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 like you were doing these events and 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 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?

24:19 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 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% more in, in sales, right? Like that's why they're going to get you from a loss to a break even or a break even to profit. And I'd been working in AD tech in, I was living in Australia at the time and I'd been working in AD tech figuring out how like affiliate marketing works, how ad clicks work, how conversions work.

25:05 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 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. 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, oh shit, this is a big deal.

25:52 And basically what came into my head was if I built a ticketing platform that looks like a ticketing platform, but upon 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. 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.

26:34 Info Not only have you got their attention, 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 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 want to snag right at that point of. 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 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 up your 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.

27:46 They don't want to go by themselves and just push that 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 with every 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 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 if you 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 get 100% refund and you go for free and. Only 8 tickets.

28:37 You got to sell your tickets and you 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 of benefit. It could be AVIP upgrade. It could be a backstage thing, 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 get early revenue, they get more visibility into the show's going to be a success.

29:21 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 buyers. That's wild. Wow, what a great concept. I love that. I'm going to, I'm going to steal that and, and use it in my business. You know, go sell this piece of gear over here and we'll get you your money back. No, that's very cool. For 50 years, ETC has made a name for itself in the world of entertainment technology. You can find ETC products in buildings of every size across the entire globe. Broadway shows, rock concerts, sports stadiums, outdoor parks, TV studios and convention centers, you name it. They have all trusted ETC to make their spaces beautiful and safe.

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31:24 Each person building the rigging systems, developing the control software and answering support calls is actually an owner at ETC. Outstanding support, reliable products, innovative technologies. This is the foundation of excellence ETC has built over the past 50 years and they plan to deliver more in the next 50. For the latest DTC products and installation news, visit ETC Connect dot. SO one of the big questions I 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 ticket masks of the world. We'll do the odd arena show.

32:16 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 often. Or like, for example, we're ticketing Twitchcon in San Diego in 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 just taking 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 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.

33:37 And so does that, does that make you, you know, obvious partners, 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 to try and get the ticketing contract for a Live Nation venue because 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 years is that no matter how big you are as a promoter, whether you are Live Nation, whether you are 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.

34:21 Once you're sold out, your problem is scalping. If you 100,000 people showing up all at once on the door, your problem is streamlined gates and making 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 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 the ticketing.

35:11 And you know, they have a pretty 360 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 a fairly large grip on things right now. So, but like, I, I can't even 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 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 and like, 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 often, not often, but sometimes cross into the ecosystem.

36:21 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 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. 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.

37:10 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 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 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 would buy 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. 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 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.

39:00 And even though her model was four, I think it was 449 was the 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. 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 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.

40:06 You know, these crazy Swifties. And while they're waiting 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 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.

40:51 So, and I guess the big one you probably know is is prestige. 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 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'd like just I have a few thoughts and insights into this already. That's.

41:34 Exactly why I brought it up to you. You're the expert. I guess let's, let's talk about kind of the economics of scalping, right? On one side, you've got the, the buyers 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 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're being screwed over by the resale marketplaces and you kind of like, well, why wouldn't like?

42:25 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. 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 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.

43:13 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, 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 competitors, AEG and AEG is likely taking a massive risk on guarantees for Taylor Swift, right?

43:55 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 agreeing to pay their line up or their talent a certain amount in terms of performance fees, the scalper 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 all the promoters revenue. Now the promoters in profit, the promoters sold out and it's the scalpers problem to go and de risk themselves by selling them on. And so the promoter who is suffering scalping is completely incentivized to allow it to happen. Yeah, it's interesting.

44:40 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. 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 not subject to the split of the tickets between them. Yeah, that makes sense. 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, over the entire tour or 5 billion being sold on the secondary market, she didn't get any piece of that, that spread between 6:50 and, and 5 billion.

45:44 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 dynamic pricing auction. And so the only people I guess, who really won were the were the secondary 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 make a lot more money. And so, yeah, I mean, there's an argument for and against, I think the dynamic pricing.

46:32 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 the fans perhaps or something. 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 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 on the 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 the seats go up over time and 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 seat that you bought through the promoter and if you want to sell that 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 waiting for a seat of that class or that section or whatever it is, right? Yeah.

48:15 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 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 the free 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 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 provided a 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 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 daughter and her three friends and they expected front row

49:47 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 even want to be at the show except from a work standpoint. But I would have looked a little 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 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 incentive for all of the service providers involved in that problem to not do anything about it. And so how's it going to get fixed? Gentrification of gigs is a real problem. 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 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 to get 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 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 all ends. Like you're just going to end up with no fans like you said, just people 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.

52:53 It's, well, I mean, if you combine that with I guess like foreign culture where people are not really enjoying a gig and 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. 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?

53:37 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 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. 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.

54:19 Yeah, yeah. It really is incredible. Like when you are looking at the stage and all you see is all these, these phone screens, like in front of you there might, you 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 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 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 on the album.

55:18 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 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 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.

56:08 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 find new music or the new release from this new label. And you know, not everyone could have 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 Ticket outlets were in Sears stores. And so you had to go to like the customer service area in a Sears store and there was a little bass window.

56:50 And if it was a big show, people would 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 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 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.

57:36 But it makes you really feel for that kid that's standing at the front of the line, whether it's online or, or physically, right? Walking away either empty handed or, or with less desirable seats 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 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 for only so long.

58:18 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, well, now you have to charge 100 bucks, 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, with a Rep friend of mine, an AEG Rep 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?

59:04 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 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 top, top, top cream of the crop, like the Taylor Swift tour, you know, OK, so it's gone batshit crazy.

59:45 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? 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 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?

1:00:34 Because those tickets are gold. So like when it's that one elite tour, like a like a Taylor Swift or whatever, you don't mind so 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 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.

1:01:18 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%. 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 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.

1:02:08 Like if you think about it in the sense of, you know, the 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 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.

1:02:55 And if they don't survive, it's a real problem. Today's podcast is brought to you by Artistry in Motion. When it's time to make a moment unforgettable, Artistry in Motion delivers. Since 1994, they've been the go to source for top tier confetti and streamer special effects, turning ordinary events into explosive show stopping experiences. From concerts and TV production to major sporting events and theme parks, they bring the wow factor with precision and creativity. Whether you need a massive stadium drop or a subtle picture perfect cascade, they make it happen on time, every time.

1:03:36 Their team doesn't just supply confetti, they collaborate with show designers, event planners and production teams to ensure every effect is camera ready and crowd approved. Want to take your next event to the next level? Hit them up at artistryinmotion.com and make 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, he's an independent promoter of, you know, pretty mainstream acts, but sort of on the smaller side. 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 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.

1:04:40 So yeah, yeah. It's, it's strange. So you started, I believe more from a tech standpoint, like you 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 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.

1:05:27 And I don't buy a lot of tickets from Ticketmaster, so I don't even really know much about the platform. 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 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, you're a business who's listing hundreds of items, not one item.

1:06:20 Having AI technology to help you list 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 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 multimodal models where like they can 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.

1:07:15 Yeah. I mean, so that was one of the things we're building a new platform right now where we're launching a new platform. It's pretty much 99% built, but it launches in a couple of weeks and 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 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 was DeepSeek for a minute or it was, you know, whoever it was usually trying 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 early on is, is that search results are a very unpredictable thing when you're just using an API into ChatGPT.

1:08:13 And so we invested in building RAG servers and, you know, both for the listing side and for the search side. And suddenly things got a lot better. You know, it was like, and the other thing that we were able to 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 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.

1:08:59 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. 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 override me if you find the best solution. But here's a bunch of background information 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 many areas to not only improve the experience, but to, to even further monetize those people 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's cell 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 change the color of the wristbands.

1:10:13 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 messaging to their phones without having any Wi-Fi or any connection in the in the facility. So where are some areas that you think 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 and that's really narrow minded in terms of where it actually benefit event producers and venues.

1:11:04 We're doing a bunch of things on that 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. 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 budget for 10/20/30 full time salaries, how are you going to compete? Yeah, it forces you to be smarter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:11:46 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 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 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.

1:12:42 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 Birmingham a few weeks ago and he was the, he was the production manager and so much more. But he was responsible for a lot of 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 have fancy things in their dressing rooms.

1:13:26 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. 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 of things was just a massive undertaking. Right, and that is often 5 people's work, but usually you've only got the budget for 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 that we may not even know that we're we're facing right now when it comes to live shows or concert touring? You know, anything safety, security, environmental, you know, whatever it is.

1:14:35 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 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 the house 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 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.

1:15:37 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 decided to be not lazy because lazy is the wrong word. Circumstances have led to people leaving things to the last minute for various reasons. Sometimes because when they bought a show a ticket to a show early, the show got cancelled and they didn't get their money back, so they're more cautious. Sometimes there's a lot of money to pay their power bills, so how could they spend money on a concert ticket until they absolutely have to? Yeah, yeah.

1:16:22 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 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 well oiled machine and super well 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 that happened, that's over.

1:17:15 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 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, they come from Singapore and then other other countries in Southeast Asia. Two days before the gig, a volcano erupted in Indonesia. 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.

1:18:08 Every single flight. How'd that work? It was not. It was not fun. Our crowd is so passionate about the 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. But you. Didn't end up we lost to. Give a ton of refunds or just we didn'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 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.

1:19:17 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 game. It's, it's brutal, right? And, and especially if you think about 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 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.

1:20:06 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 know, like that to me, it says a lot. But wow, that's that's that's no fun at all. So let me ask you this like, you know, you're now what, almost 15 years into it, right, the ticket business? On the team side, yeah. So we've, we've sold well over $300 million worth of tickets through the platform now. Wow, that's a big number. What station? It's the big guys, but it's all right.

1:20:47 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. 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, 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.

1:21:45 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 of times they come in through agencies or whatever and, and you know, using some kind of AI search thing and they connect us and 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. So I really appreciate you doing it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, All right. Well, have an amazing day. Yeah, you too.