An Irish firm is helping venues sell tickets and know punters better, writes Mark Hennessy, London Editor
IRISH IT entrepreneurs may be about to revolutionise ticket sales, with the help of a small concert venue in Kilburn in north London, co-run by an Irish publican.
The Luminaire on the Kilburn High Road started with a basic creed: musicians and the audience should be treated with respect, and barmen should serve drink quietly during an acoustic session.
The philosophy has served the 275-seat venue well. Less than a year after it opened, it was chosen as Time Out's live venue of the year. It picked up Music Week's UK venue of the year award a year later.
Now, the Luminaire is the test location for TicketABC, new software from a small Irish IT start-up called Ticket Text, which offers venues the opportunity to bypass ticket-selling giant Ticketmaster. More importantly, the software can be used to manage a venue and cut costs. It also allows venues to develop relations with their best customers and boost sales from merchandising and drink.
“Venues want to take ticket sales inhouse,” says Ticket Text founder Dubliner Mark McLaughlin, a former Goldman Sachs employee, “but the software to do it affordably wasn’t there up to now, particularly for the smaller ones.” Using TicketABC’s software, venues can sell tickets on their own website for a 5 per cent fee to the IT firm – far lower than Ticketmaster, while wireless scanners can later be used to regulate entry. It also gathers valuable informationalong the way: how often they come to the venue, what drinks they have there etc.
"Venues can get some of that information from the ticket-sellers, but with difficulty. And it is when they get that information that counts. Getting it retrospectively doesn't help much," McLaughlin told The Irish Times.
“Our system will tell when a particular customer has entered the building, that he likes a certain type of beer and that he occasionally buys a T-shirt. If you are a regular enough customer, you can then get special offers by text.
“People are more likely to give information to a venue that they like and to which they go often, rather than to a ticket-seller that annoys them because of all of the extra charges that they add on.”
Using the information gathered, venues can then plan forensically for later gigs: the type of food and drinks required for particular audiences and the times people turn up beforehand, along with managing future events calendars.
The live music business is changing: “It’s saturated at the top of the market. Too many people are touring and for too long. That is why we are focusing on the small-to-medium end of the market. People will spend £20 on a ticket and a couple of pints for a night out. But our clients are saying that ticket prices are key. If things are not going well, we can go into the system and simply cut the prices,” McLaughlin says.
In February, TicketABC used its software to handle ticket sales and venue management on the night for the UCD Ball in Dublin, attended by 8,000 people.
Since then, an updated version has been installed at the Luminaire and TicketABC and the Kilburn venue (a client, not a partner) are teasing out the possibilities. “The attractions for us were obvious,” says Andy Inglis of Luminaire. “It offered us the opportunity to take our ticket-selling inside without the customer paying more in booking fees, and it allows us to know more about customers. [TicketABC] is very responsive. If we say that we want the system to do X, they are willing to go away and build it,” he says, indicating how the system could be linked directly to social networking sites.
In time, he says, the software could manage the business: “We have 80 gigs on the books right now. Some of them are for dates in February and March next. There is a lot of administration in all of that. This system can run as the diary. It’s a pretty handy tool.”
In the US, one of the most closely watched start-ups is Eventbrite, which generated $100 million in sales from events where the average attendance was just 36 – up to now a market way too small for any IT entrepreneur.
Eventbrite, founded by Kevin Hartz, an early investor in PayPal, charges venues 2.5 per cent of the ticket price, plus a 99 cent service fee but it does not offer the event management possibilities of TicketABC. TicketABC’s target market – mid-sized venues, festivals, clubs and parks – in Britain alone is huge. More than £700 million was spent by audiences wanting to turn up in such places last year.
