For decades, the ticket industry has been built on one battle.
Regulation versus a “free market.” Closed versus open.
Both sides claim similar things: “We are fighting for the fans.”
Protecting the fan. Serving the fan.
It’s a lie.
Not an intentional one. But a lie.
Every solution either side offers adds a layer between the fan and the experience.
More platforms. More fees. More friction.
The fan isn’t protected. The fan is processed. Just a series of 0s and 1s in some computer code.
The real question shouldn’t be open versus closed. The real question needs to be who does this system actually serve?
To use my Strategy Stack question: “What does success look like?”
The Fan as a mark
In theory, the fan is the most important thing in the building. The source of everything. The reason the lights are on.
No fans. No band.
No fans. A game can take place on a public pitch.
No fans…
In practice, the fan has become a mark. A target. Someone to be harvested and maximized to reach peak transaction value.
On the primary side, technology was supposed to bring fans closer. To make purchasing a ticket easier. Safer. Fairer.
Instead, it built walls.
Verified fan programs that verify nothing except who is willing to jump through hoops.
Dynamic pricing that feels rigged to adjust in real time while a fan stares at a ticket they think they have in their cart…all the while wondering if they can really afford the ticket they just picked.
Queue systems that announce that you are number 745,532 but your chance to buy tickets is just a moment away.
This doesn’t help a fan connect with a team or artist. This helps a fan be managed. Kept waiting, but on the hook just enough so they don’t close their browser.
Extract maximum data and dollars before the experience even begins.
Then the secondary market turns the whole thing into a casino. Brokers deploy buying teams and BOTs. Sophisticated operations designed to game access before any fan has a shot.
The on-sale bump that used to signal real excitement?
Now it’s speculation. Broker activity dressed up as “demand.”
The emotional connection between fan and artist? Fan and team? That’s the vulnerability to be exploited…a fan’s love is the lever.
The signals are already screaming
Empty seats are the truth the sales numbers hide.
A team or a venue can look at the gate and feel fine. You may have sold 80%? 90%? Fully clean?
But are there fans that will sit in those seats? Or was it brokers speculating on an event that never got “hot?”
“Heat,” or excitement, are words the industry throws around to mask the fact that too many people don’t know how to market and sell an event any longer.
Broker activity has been mistaken for fan demand and was labeled “strategy.”
Now that casino is going quiet.
Vivid Seats and StubHub’s stocks have cratered. Sales are slowing. Brokers are pulling back, either because money is tighter or they’ve moved into other “industries” with higher ROIs.
(As I was preparing this, Vivid’s Q1 results were announced…a $14.6M loss.)
The speculation engine that propped up primary sales is sputtering.
Look at tours. The ones that go on-sale with lots of noise and fanfare. Then, disappear.
“Routing issues.”
“Reworking the production.”
“Illness.”
Sometimes these explanations are true. Often, they are not.
Pussycat Dolls.
Post Malone.
Meghan Trainor.
The genre doesn’t matter. The pattern holds.
The tickets don’t sell. The screenshots of thousands and thousands of blue dots put the excuses in a new light.
The broker activity that helped make demand look good on paper didn’t translate to real sales when brokers didn’t buy. Then, canceling is a better solution than playing to a half-empty house for the entire world to see.
Cancellation is the last-ditch extraction exit. The fan gets a refund and disappointment. The artist gets an easy out. The real story is hidden behind a cancellation explained away by “market conditions.”
On the fan side, the buying timeline has collapsed. The on-sale bump is often bots. The week before push is gone. For so many events, the real buying happens in the last six or eight hours before an event.
More likely than not, the last hour or two.
This is what extraction trained the market to do. Wait. Compare. Hunt for a deal.
Fans became bargain hunters. Tickets became commodities.
Once this happened, they stopped being fans in the real sense. The relationship became transactional…a price point.
Sugar highs don’t fix things
As the empty seat problem becomes undeniable, the industry uses the same two tricks:
Comps
Discounts
Discounts.
You know me: “Discounts are dummies.”
The discount button is easy to push. It feels like action. You might get a bounce. It works for one game…a week, maybe.
Then, when you go back to it…it works a little bit less. Then, again, a little bit less.
Until people stop reacting at all.
Comps. Papering the house. Give the tickets away.
Fill the building with friends, family, and anyone you can find who will take them.
Great. The band won’t play to an empty house. The TV camera won’t pick up the empty seats.
Except the redemption rate on comps is usually low: 30% or less.
You’re giving away free tickets, and seven out of ten won’t even be used.
This isn’t a strategy. This is surrender.
Both moves train the fans. Both moves undermine the perceived value of your event. Both moves tell your potential buyers that even you don’t believe that the value you offer is worth the price you want people to pay.
So, people wait.
For cheaper. For free.
The cycle accelerates.
Who’s actually building?
Ask who still puts fans first in a way that isn’t a press release or an ad campaign…and the list gets short fast.
The Grateful Dead built the original model. They viewed their fans as an asset.
REM carried this mantle forward.
Pearl Jam picked up the torch and spent decades protecting their fans from predatory behaviors.
Sturgill Simpson and Olivia Rodrigo seem to be reaching for something similar. A different way to maintain a connection to their fans without making them feel like an ATM.
And then the list gets thin.
A handful of artists are so big. So popular that they can run pure extraction machines. The numbers are undeniable.
But the fans don’t seem bothered by it.
In fact, if you point it out, fans go nuts.
The exception that proves the rule. Not the rule.
Everyone says, “fan first.” Almost no one is building it. The actions aren’t consistent. The model doesn’t reward it yet.
What the fan actually wants you to hear
If a team, a manager, a venue stopped extracting long enough to listen…the truth would come out.
Maybe not in these exact words, but close.
The fan feels at a distance from something they want to experience as a community. A tribe. A collective.
The emotional connection is frayed. Not broken. Not yet.
They don’t want to be just a transaction. They want to belong.
I know what this feels like. Because I’ve been reluctant to help a favorite team or performer.
The University of Alabama asked me about fundraising best practices some years ago. I could have charged. I didn’t. I just helped. No contract. No invoice.
I wanted to keep the relationship pure. I didn’t want commerce to touch something I loved.
That’s the fan’s real position. Not looking for a cheaper ticket. Looking for a connection that is bigger than a transaction.
The first real move
Regulation won’t solve this. The “free market” isn’t the answer either.
You start with customer orientation. You listen. Conversations with fans. Conversations with non-buyers. Surveys. Roundtables.
Voice and proximity over data.
Small data before big data.
The regulation debate is a mirage. Both sides argue over who gets to run the extraction machine while the machine itself is on life support.
The real opportunity isn’t in winning the argument. It’s about building something that this argument doesn’t even touch.
A renewed connection between you and the fan.
On the podcast, we had Brian Vinson.
We talked:
- Horse racing
- Data
- Baseball
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