Just once more, what’s the problem again?

As we have established in the previous FAQ blog, the ticketing industry is riddled with mystery. The ‘black box’ effect we call it, which casts a big shadow over the earnings from tickets and the subsequent distribution of these earnings.

If you haven’t heard it yet, this episode of Freakonomics podcast does a good job of summarizing all things wrong with the event ticketing industry.

A quick summarized example: Artists put up their tickets for sale for a very carefully calculated amount, so that everyone who contributes to the show taking place (crew, venue, caterer, etcetera) can be paid accordingly. These tickets then get bought up by a bot and put on sale for three times the original price on a shady website. Fans then buy these expensive tickets and 200% of the original price ends up going to some schmuck who figured out how to make bots buy things. The fans of course don’t know the original price and are just glad that they obtained a ticket to see their favorite artist. An added bonus is that they don’t have to worry about how they’ll spend their golden years of retirement because those days will never come after spending so much money on a single ticket.

It can be assumed that there will always be actors in society that will try to game the system and use it in a way to profit from the inefficiencies created by the ticketing technology itself. The behavior of these actors isn’t the core of the problem in our belief, offering ticketing systems that take no effective measures to prevent this, however, is.

Technologies like the GET Protocol assume that there will always be actors trying to profit from a certain ticket sale. As a ticketing company, we believe it is our responsibility to ensure that our ticketing and identification technology cannot be gamed and profited upon by independent actors in the open market. The time to blame consumers of scalping tickets are over, the technology to prevent this type of profiteering behavior has come to fruition and has proven itself to be effective.

At this point I hope it is annoyingly obvious why this needs to change. If only there was some innovative form of technology that could create instant transparency and accountability to an entire industry if properly applied! Oh well, too bad… Enter blockchain, obviously.

Enough build-up, let’s cut to the chase. Why is it such a big step forward? Why can’t we just slap those fancy dynamic QR codes on every ticket from now on and make companies promise that they won’t engage in any shady business?

Well, because they won’t keep those promises. Today’s endless list of reports of fans being duped by the very company they are paying to dupe them (I call this the dupe-loop™), should show you that they won’t. It’s an insanely competitive business and any available advantage will be taken. That’s why none must be given. That’s kind of the whole premise of our freakin’ mission.

A changing QR code locked to the identity and smartphone from the consumer. Cool feature to prevent resale! But this doesn't need a blockchain right? Is it all smoke and mirrors?

Okay sure, save the planet, that’s nice. But how exactly?

It comes down to the transparency-by-design of blockchain and the friction-less payments between consumers/actors this infrastructure provides. The value of the blockchain really comes from the inherent transparency it offers ticket holders, both in registering ownership changes but also from accounting for value flows during the primary and secondary ticket trade.

The solution to scalping brought forward by GUTS is a combination of identity/smart-phone bound event tickets that display a code that changes dependent on both time and ownership. Every minute the code changes on the smartphone ticket, thereby invalidating and nullifying the code displayed previously. This removes the ability to resell the ticket within an unregulated secondary market. If a consumer wishes to resell their ticket, the user is able to anonymously offer the ticket back for sale at the primary market. In this solution, there is no difference between the primary and secondary market. While this centralized ticketing solution is rather elegant, it is not the solution targeting the root of the problem. After all, this ticketing solution would only shift towards the ticketing company offering this service. This means that the power and data is still completely centralized. This will create another non- transparent cost/earning model, resulting in the same problems we aim to tackle in the first place.

To prevent centralization of control and data is why we have initiated the open and public blockchain protocol (GET Protocol). This public ledger registers ownership and value transfer on the blockchain. A publicly available ledger that can be accessed by anybody with an internet connection. This public and open-source protocol using the blockchain is in the end what really delivers on the core of the problem of inefficiencies in the ticketing space; centralization of data and non-transparent value stream. (Black box!) Blockchain registration is public by default, by using this innovative technology socially desirable behavior by all actors is converged upon (consumers, artists, venues and ticketing companies).