The last couple of weeks have been all about listening and learning for the Artos team. As well as productive discussions at our industry roundtable earlier in the month, we spent last week at TheTicketingBusiness Forum in Manchester, hearing from attendees about their views and concerns. Playing host to over 500 of the world’s leading thinkers, movers and shakers in the live entertainment ticketing world, TBF is a key event in the ticketing industry calendar.

Not a bad view!

CTO Andy Grant participated in the panel Adventures in Blockchain, alongside Steve Machin (CEO of Dot Tickets) and David Franklin (Head of Ticketing Technology, Paleo Festival).There’s a lot of buzz around blockchain at the moment, which has led to a lot of misconceptions about what it is and does; Andy’s presentation aimed to overview some of the terminology used, dispel some of the myths around the technology and provide clarification around key areas of misunderstanding.

Teo talking ticketing tech

One of the common pieces of feedback we received during the show is that people have heard of blockchain, but don’t necessarily understand what it is — or how its benefits might be applied to the ticketing space. For those that did have a more in-depth understanding, there was a lot of concern about access control and how blockchain-enabled ticketing would be implemented on the door.

We hear you — blockchain can be a bit of a maze to the uninitiated, especially when people start bandying about technical terminology! Media buzz about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin further complicates the issue, as this is often the only blockchain use-case people are familiar with — when in fact its potential applications are so much broader.

As a response, we’re working on a primer for how blockchain can work in the ticketing space, as well as a step-by-step guide to how access control would work and fit into your current processes. Stay tuned, as these will appear in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, you can watch Andy’s full talk here, or view the slide-set and speaker notes here.