Fact: The future of event ticketing has little to do with the rectangular, paper tickets customers are accustomed to.
At least two ticketing competitors — behemoth Ticketmaster and Denver-based TicketHorse — have introduced paperless ticketing models that allow fans to assign their tickets to credit cards and driver’s licenses.
Just as with airline tickets at airports, customers need only swipe a card at the Pepsi Center’s door to access their Denver Nuggets or Elton John seat locators — a stub that sends you in the right direction.
No stops at will call. No lost or fraudulent tickets.
The irony of a ticketless ticketing industry isn’t lost on TicketHorse general manager Nick Collison, who ran the Pepsi Center box office for seven years before co-founding the new ticketing agency TicketHorse in 2005.
TicketHorse is focused so much on its dynamic FlashSeats technology, which allows customers a paperless alternative, that it’s now the only free option for ticket delivery — even picking up tickets at will call comes with a $3 charge at .
“The biggest challenge is getting the word out,” Collison said recently from his office above Brauns Bar and Grill on the Pepsi Center grounds.
Sitting across Collison’s desk a few weeks ago was Paul Andrews, executive vice president of Kroenke Sports Enterprises, of which TicketHorse is a business division. Andrews co-founded the ticketing division with Collison, and his expectations for the now-modest Colorado-centered company are massive.
“Five years from now, it’ll be just like the airport is to you and I now,” Andrews said. “I haven’t taken a hard ticket to the airport in how many years. I don’t even think about it. That’s where you’re going to see venues five years from now for sure, and we hope a lot sooner at the Pepsi Center.”
Ticketing partnerships
Ticketmaster’s Paperless Ticketing has sold more than 1 million seats, while TicketHorse’s comparable FlashSeats is about to cross the 100,000 mark in sales. But don’t count TicketHorse out because of its modest start. (Ticketmaster services more than 80 percent of the United States’ largest arenas and stadiums, according to industry mag Pollstar.) TicketHorse went from selling 353,000 tickets in its first year, 2007, to a more than 3 million projected tickets for 2010, with a big boost in July of last year, when the Pepsi Center went from being a Ticketmaster venue to a TicketHorse room.
With the recent creation of Live Nation Entertainment — the result of last month’s Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger — fans are wondering how that will impact their live-music experience. Now all eyes are on AEG Live, Live Nation’s main competition in concert promotion, owned by Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz, to find a new partner to help them retain market share.
Some think Stan Kroenke, president of KSE, might be that partner. KSE and AEG already have two partnerships — both of which are in Colorado. (Kroenke also has a residence in Colorado, in a penthouse atop the Pepsi Center.) AEG’s Mile High Music Festival takes place at the Kroenke-owned Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City, and the 1stBank Center, formerly the Broomfield Event Center, is operated by KSE and AEG, and owned by the city of Broomfield.
“We have great partners in AEG,” Andrews said. “We’ve always had a great relationship with Chuck (Morris, president of AEG Live Rocky Mountains) personally. And Mr. Kroenke and Mr. Anschutz are very good friends.”
KSE is something of an empire. It owns and runs the Pepsi Center, Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, Paramount Theatre and co-manages the 1stBank Center. It owns many of the sports teams that call these venues home, including the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids and Colorado Mammoth. And of course there’s Altitude Sports & Entertainment, the KSE-owned cable network that broadcasts many of those teams’ games.
But TicketHorse is one of the more fascinating arms of the KSE empire. The ethos behind TicketHorse is that of change. Like anybody else in the ticketing industry, Collison and Andrews have a long history with Ticketmaster. So they both know what they like and respect about the ticketing powerhouse. More important: They know what they dislike.
Collison and Andrews talk big about their product, as they should. Ticketing is a merciless industry, and they have a true advantage with FlashSeats. But they also talk boldly about protecting the customer — when really the system is more concerned with protecting the box office.
TicketHorse’s immediate advantage over Ticketmaster isn’t so much how it protects customers. It’s how it caters to its customer. Consumers using the company’s simple FlashSeats can transfer their paperless tickets to friends by logging on and pressing “send.” It’s as easy as sending an e-mail, and Ticketmaster’s system doesn’t have a comparable alternative.
“Five minutes before the show, you can forward your ticket to your friend,” Andrews said. “Otherwise you have a hard ticket, and you’re stuck at work and there’s nothing you can do.”
If you want to resell the ticket yourself, the FlashSeats Marketplace is a simple and safe resale market — similar to Ticketmaster’s Paperless TicketExchange.
While this really is good news for the consumer, the main purpose of FlashSeats is obvious. TicketHorse is doing its best to quash scalping and the secondary market. And like every other ticketing agency, it’s making sure that if there is a secondary market that it will be a part of it.
TicketHorse’s leg up
Some of the many advantages of FlashSeats from TicketHorse’s perspective:
A FlashSeat purchase can’t be scalped. Whoever owns the ticket swipes his or her card at the entry and receives a seat-locator stub. Ticket-holders can’t go outside and sell it at that time. They have to stay inside the building.
Think about the mailing list such a system creates. As you transfer the tickets to friends, and your friends fill out the basic online form that attaches the tickets to their credit card or driver’s license, that’s another valuable piece of information for TicketHorse’s mailing list.
In certain situations, TicketHorse can turn off the ability to transfer the seats. For fan-club presales and comp tickets, the agency can turn off the transferring ability so that whoever purchased or signed up for an individual ticket has to be the same person who uses it. That shuts down the secondary market outside of the TicketHorse-run FlashSeats Marketplace.
TicketHorse officials want to press that many of these measures also protect consumers.
“Pick a big game, like Nuggets versus Lakers, and this is what we deal with: There will be 20 people who come to the box office with a false ticket they got through another reseller,” Andrews said. “TicketHorse is the only guaranteed source for you to resell your seats. With StubHub, eBay, craigslist or any other reseller in the market, it’s buyer beware.”
Adds Collison: “I ran the Pepsi Center box office for seven years before coming over here, and at every single event I worked, we would deal with those fake tickets. We’re about three or four months into this, but we can already see a noticeable impact on fraud and those sorts of things.”
Andrews believes in the technology so much that he’s considering a FlashSeats-only policy on single ticket sales, should any of the sports franchises make the playoffs.
As for TicketHorse as a company, its looking to steadily build in Colorado — and then start its national push. It has a new client in SkyVenture Colorado, an indoor skydiving facility in Lone Tree that facilitates 46,000 flights annually. And it’s looking to expand into the arts and other areas.
Should we expect an international TicketHorse client in Holloway, North London, where the Arsenal Football Club — of which Kroenke is a major shareholder — is based? Not anytime soon, Andrews said.
“They have a contract with a different ticketing provider,” Andrews said. “Mr. Kroenke is a shareholder, so we’re not involved with the day- to-day business operations at this point.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@ ; @RVRB on Twitter
