Industry news & advice blog

Ticketflash is a new ticketing app that allows buyers to share and return tickets easily, no questions asked. It also allows promoters and bands to sell tickets using their hashtags.

Did mobile deliver the promised ticketing revolution?

You’ve probably read online about how bad the ticket-buying experience can be, particularly on the secondary market.

More than 10 years after the launch of the iPhone, mobile tech, which brought solutions to our fingertips, has made so many tasks simpler and easier. So how did ticketing get left behind?

Why aren’t music tickets returnable? 

It turns out there are plenty of reasons tickets aren’t returnable, but none of them are related to technology.

Firstly, shifting tickets is hard work. After the cost of promotion, profits are often thin. A promoters aim is to sell out as quickly as possible to manage their cashflow. Returned tickets mean lost profit, more spend on marketing and more headache getting everyone paid.

Secondly, no-shows at gigs hurt everyone and reflect poorly on the promoter, and for a larger scale event it can have a knock-on effect to merchandise and food sales etc, which depend on footfall, not to mention the event atmosphere.

Cash flow management also has an impact. Closing the box office and dishing out cash often happens on the day of the event. There are multiple parties involved in putting on a gig, and all want paying before, or straight after the event. Ticket returns can make this reconciliation process more difficult.

And then there’s fraud. With any return process, there will always be the risk of people trying to play the system by claiming refunds they’re not entitled to. This isn’t just a consumer problem, often it can have severe legal, and financial implications with all the associated damage to reputations. Getting burned on this, even once, is enough to put most new ticketing businesses off providing a simple returns process.

Finally, there’s inertia - old systems, the good-old status quo. Because that’s the way it’s always been.

And there’s still very little sharing…

Like returnability, mobile should have brought in an era of ticket sharing. After all, with mobile in hand, sharing a ticket with friends or family should simply have been a few taps away. Several apps like Dice, offer a well thought out sharing feature.

Sharing, like returnability, has been blocked by the unwillingness of the larger ticketing providers to build processes into their existing systems.

Making tickets returnable and shareable sounds like a small fix to a big problem. Lots of smaller ticket providers are now taking small steps in this direction. There are many hurdles to overcome, but cracking this nut could be the start of a new standard in ticketing and a much better consumer experience.

Can event discovery be even easier?

There are plenty of apps and websites that have tried make event discovery easier. Songkick, for example, built a whole business model around it. But could it be easier still?

One way to do this would be to link tickets directly to hashtags. Hashtags are everywhere as they’re a great way to get users to join a conversation, and for aggregating content online. They’re useful for fixing you into a discussion on social media, and because they’re discoverable after the event, bands can maximise their exposure.

But often they don’t lead anywhere except to a discussion thread. They simply wash over consumers generating little interest.

Sometimes you want your hashtag to deliver a real-time response; a call to action. And you want to be able to measure the impact of that call. After all, you and your band members spend hours a week hammering at your hashtags on social media. You drive a lot of chatter online, but you’re never sure if you’re driving ticket sales. How can you find out?

There are several tracking tools to monitor hashtags, for example Keyhole. But unless you’ve generated the hashtag, it’s difficult to identify the impact. Often, monitoring hashtags has been done on an ad-hoc basis.

Make your gig ticketing simpler with Ticketflash

Ticketflash have launched an app (£1.99) that allows sellers to link ticket sales directly to their hashtags. You create an account and link your hashtag. Once buyers have downloaded the app, they enter a hashtag to go directly to a list of events linked to the hashtag. You can link as many hashtags as you want to any event which means you can see whose hashtag, and which social media is driving sales.

The app also allows punters to return tickets up to 48 hours before the event for a full refund, no questions asked. And if it’s less than 48 hours before the event, you get a partial refund dependent on the value of returned tickets sold. You can also share your ticket at anytime with friends who have the app.

Find out more about Ticketflash or contact them directly on 0121 516 8357 or email [email protected]