Blockbuster or a Bust? Tickets Industry Lines Up Around the Blockchain

Ticketmaster, one of the largest event ticket distributors in the world, announced in October 2018 that it had acquired Upgraded, a blockchain technology company specializing in live event ticketing.

The company intends to use blockchain to provide event creators with more control and visibility over ticket distribution, while protecting fans against fraudulent tickets.

"The whole point of implementing blockchain in the ticketing industry is to bring back fairness to the artists, event organizers and fans. For example, a major problem facing the industry is counterfeit tickets. Blockchain can prevent this by allowing attendees to verify the authenticity of their tickets. This also turns tickets into scarce digital assets, which are unable to be double sold."

Once controlled pricing of tickets is achieved, demographics can be captured that would allow the secondary market to cater to fans directly - creating a truly decentralized solution for the ticketing industry.

Tokenization for decentralized ticketingThe author of the book Blockchain Revolution and co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, Alex Tapscott, also pointed out that Ticketmaster's use of blockchain technology could potentially harm the ticketing industry.

Tapscott suggested that tokenizing event tickets could solve many problems facing the industry, as individuals would be able to barter and trade peer-to-peer, enabling better price discovery, lower rates and fewer counterfeit tickets - and would presumably end, "The double spend problem which still occurs with photocopies of barcodes, for example, and less value being captured asymmetrically by some sanctioned middleman like Ticketmaster."

Alan Rakov, the vice president of business development and ticketing partnerships at FanDragon - an open, blockchain-powered software-as-a-service mobile ticket delivery system - thinks that Ticketmaster's use of blockchain technology will eventually benefit the entire ticketing industry.

While providing insights to secondary markets can be achieved easier using a public blockchain, there are still some crucial advantages a private blockchain could bring to ticket distributors.

True Tickets creates and preserves ticket provenance by identifying all buyers and sellers to ensure that both the tickets and the people buying them are legitimate.

According to Cuomo, while the solution is still in its very early stages, True Tickets and Shubert Ticketing have plans to launch a pilot to test secure mobile tickets for Broadway shows in 2020.It's not really about the blockchain.