When it comes to exploring trends, as in any industry, there are big names seeking to maintain and grow their position by ensuring they keep up with trends and smaller companies looking to disrupt by positioning themselves to take advantage of a trend, hoping they’ve picked the trend that will be most long-lived with the greatest adoption. In the ticketing space, we have been monitoring and discussing the innovations that are moving towards being a trend, those that seem to work, those that either haven’t worked or which are too early to lend themselves for mass adoption.

In the following discussion paper, we will present to you our key findings that have been curated from roundtables with ticketing professionals, academia and governmental representatives, from ticketing events, market researches and surveys.

Trend 1 — Smart tickets

Tickets are going to get smarter, more personal and more mobile. We predict that some of the technology-oriented trends will include an accelerated adoption of sophisticated mobile tickets — thanks to a range of new technologies, the use of paper tickets will significantly decline, other than for a small number of very specific use-cases.

A study conducted by Juniper shows that the mobile tickets market for sports events will have a growth of 64%, from $14 billion to $23 billion by 2023.

Furthermore, the adoption of smart tickets using mobile platforms, for the broader market, will surge 73% by 2023.

With the rise of smart tickets, we will most probably see an increase in cross-selling services and products, a marketing strategy used by brands to enhance their customer success rate.

Trend 2 — Increased regulation

There is obvious anticipation that the secondary market will continue to be subjected to increased regulation around the world. In markets with fewer legislative restrictions, rights-holders are looking at the best ways to optimize resale channels. This will create additional demand for solutions that can enforce rules around the transfer of tickets, and that can empower tickets themselves to be smart or dynamic.

Both the smart-ticket trend and increased-regulation one will expedite the move towards de-anonymized tickets. We will see a welcome shift towards the growth of Unique Individual (UI) tickets and Known Individual (KI) tickets. This will power an explosion in the value of data services as a wealth of meta-information, making business-insights available in a non-invasive and secure way.

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has found irregularities on various secondary markets websites, without naming them, and mentioned it will take legal action if the companies operating these sites don’t comply.

Furthermore to CMA’s intent, a new organisation, the Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing (FEAT) has been formed to help European ticketing markets get more adoption of the reinforced legislation over the secondary markets.

The aim is to tighten the rules around resellers in UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

Trend 3 — More desired control from rights holders

Brand, money, data will be the key points to touch when it comes to having more control over and promoters, venues, artists and event managers are definitely showing more and more interest towards to.

We have seen quite a few scandals in 2018 where various artists have lost control over their tickets to certain secondary markets, a very detrimental brand experience for those in the cause.

A recent survey by Aventus of concert-goers in the USA showed that a bad experience while purchasing online tickets and denial of access at the venue due to ticket fraud, has a significant negative impact over the artist’s reputation. To be more precise, 54% of the respondents consider that ticket scams interfere with fans’ perception of the brand.

With this in mind, it is clear that rights holders want to maintain their reputation and brand intact, their expenses under control, while maximising the marketing and sales strategies.

Trend 4 — Biometrics

Developments around biometrics and security and a shift towards mobile means interoperability based on an open standard is not just a possibility but a feasible value proposition.

Microsoft recently announced during the Economic World Forum at Davos, that they will be supporting facial recognition regulation. A structured framework that is compliant with privacy and human rights is needed and its development is in progress with the technology looking to be here to stay and likely to see greater adoption.

For example, Ticketmaster has publicly stated that they are working on a facial recognition identification system in collaboration with Blink Identity.

“Our revolutionary identity in motion product identifies people as they walk past a sensor at full walking speed, enabling frictionless identification,” — Ticketmaster

In December 2018, Clear announced a partnership with Major League Baseball and Tickets.com. Fans now have the option to choose a ticketing/verification method using fingerprints for some ballparks.

By using biometrics, the queueing bottlenecks can be avoided, and because printed tickets cease to exist, they can’t be replicated or lost as easily.

With this trend intensifying, a genuinely open standard will protect commercial interests and personal data, while enabling all of our customers and clients to interact with tickets seamlessly, within innovative and modular service environments. An open standard would be a growth engine for the event industries that rely upon ticketing, while simultaneously adding value and convenience to everyone in the ticketing ecosystem — rights-holders, venues, vendors, brands, and ultimately, ticket holders and attendees.

Trend 5 — New technology in town

One of the buzzwords of 2017 and 2018 was BLOCKCHAIN. Many don’t understand the technology or have yet to determine a use-case but it remains a hot topic and there are visible efforts to abstract the concept and present its advantages in ways people can digest and assimilate.

Blockchain technology isn’t new, however, it has become increasingly popular since the birth of the Bitcoin in 2009. A type of distributed ledger technology (DLT), Blockchain lends itself best to an open network in a low trust environment, where both transparency and privacy can co-exist, due to encryption.

In the ticketing space, Ticketmaster has signalled its interest in the technology by acquiring a private-blockchain company, Upgraded Tickets. This is a significant move coming from the industry’s giant and creates a call to action for other players to take interest in this tech.

All the trends discussed above can be implemented and securely achieved using the open-network, in fact, some of the advantages of the blockchain technology are to offer control, security and transparency over the life-cycle of the ticket, reinforcing legislation and business relations for the involved parties.

For more info, please get in touch with us at marketing@aventus.io.