It’s two minutes to nine. You know the drill. You have your laptop and several other devices at the ready, multiple browsers and tabs open, credit card details pre-saved and… “sorry, #tickets are not currently available” …it’s sold out 💔😭 1/6 bit.ly/illegaltickettouting

Fun fact: my first job out of college in 2017 was founding a blockchain ticketing company called Cryptix (cryptographic tickets) to solve live event ticket fraud & scalping. We created an onchain ticket minting flow with Eventbrite's API and the Hyperledger blockchain, so event organizers could have full observability and rule enforcement inside of an integrated secondary marketplace. These tools would allow artists to sell directly to legit fans, set resale price limits, capture revenue from all primary/secondary transactions, and see who is actually coming to their shows. Sounds great in theory, but we got nowhere. These were the roadblocks that I ran into with the music industry: 1. Live Nation owns some of the largest venues in the US and gets to choose their ticket management software. Big surprise that they choose Ticketmaster for their venues (which they also own), boxing out competitors from the largest opportunities. 2. Smaller, independent venues have the ability to try other ticketing providers but don't have the same level of urgency around fraud & scalping, by nature of hosting smaller acts. This makes it difficult to establish an initial wedge in the market. 3. Primary ticketing issuers oftentimes don't publicly want to be associated with resale markets, which can have a negative consumer sentiment from perceived price gouging. Even though an integrated marketplace solves many of the issues here, its seen by some in the music industry to carry brand risk. 4. Promotion companies have different metrics for success other than maximizing revenue. Often times they want to be able to say that they "sold out a venue in X minutes/hours". Ironically, scalpers & bots snapping up tickets can help achieve this metric, though it ends up hurting venues who needs max attendance to make revenue on concession sales. 5. Live event tickets are an emotional transaction for both artists and fans, leading to downward price distortions. Artists massively underprice their tickets in order to build goodwill with fans, though the downstream effect is that the consumer surplus is captured by off-platform professional resellers. I'm excited for the current wave of music x crypto entrepreneurs like @3LAU @Cooopahtroopa @joeyinywho @roneil that have stuck with it, and have a good shot at making a difference in an industry that desperately needs it 🙂

This confirms that touts have connections to insiders not just re information, but also for access to ticket allocations that are taken away from public sales for profit. The leak includes dates in 🇨🇦 and 🇺🇸 – it will be interesting to see if these are announced at some point 4/9

Is it just the secondary market or does the primary market need looking at too? How are the touts getting their hands on so many tickets when real fans can’t? @FanFairAlliance