Recode Decode Former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard explains why live venues are leaving money on the table
Rival is an operating system for venues. (2:49)
People like going to live events but the experience around it is fundamentally broken. There is no canonical source were you can see all of your options to see a show. (3:47)
Problems with live tickets industry: $15 billion a year in reselling tickets. (Lost revenue for sports teams and music artists). The teams or artists don’t know who is coming to their shows. For some events they know less than 10% of their customers. (Should know 100%) (4:23)
Rival makes teams more money, it introduces them to all their fans, and it keeps everyone safer. (8:13)
I think they [Ticketmaster] are as much a partner for us as they are a competitor. (I’d guess Ticketmaster buys Rival in a few years) (13:42)
You will see the market blur the line between primary and secondary ticket sales. Those words (primary / secondary ) are not fan words. (15:12)
When I was at Ticketmaster we fought Stub Hub by going after their business - we went deep into secondary (sales). That kept Stub Hub in their lane. (17:05)
Why didn’t Amazon get into the business? It is a supply-driven business and they don’t have supply. You could build a beautiful consumer interface but if you don’t actually have supply it doesn’t matter. (20:24)
If a music artist is making 80%-90% of their money from touring how long can the other stakeholders (Apple, Spotify) in the industry stay out of that? (24:21)
Peter: Spotify is the only digital music company that is only digital music. Everyone else is selling something else. Nathan: Spotify is on a journey to be more than that. They will vertically integrate into content or horizontally expand into other kinds of media and raise prices. (24:46)
Where is Twitter going to go from here? I’m waiting for the Snap merger. It’s time. The best thing you want as a large incumbent is all of your little competitors to be fragmented and having to sell against each other. Because what they end up doing is selling against each other’s advance proposition not the big incumbents. (32:27)
The last decade has facilitated this transition from music artists to entrepreneurs. The biggest artists in the world are the best brand managers you know. We will continue to see more of them pop up and use their leverage. (More money stays with the talent - where it belongs) (43:34)