Taylor Swift Jam Puts Ticketmaster on Defense as Jump and Others Make Moves in Ticketing

A Taylor Swift ticketing dustup late last year has put an unwelcome spotlight on the event ticketing sector at a time when changes are coming to an industry that’s effectively been dominated by one name for over a decade.

Think about this: In January, The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing called “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment” during which Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, without a hint of irony: “I just want to dispel this notion that this is not a monopoly and then we can go from there about solutions.”

Klobuchar was referring to Ticketmaster and its event promotion division Live Nation, which controls an estimated 70% of ticket sales for major events. The company came under fire for website crashes that prevented fans from procuring tickets to see Swift’s latest tour, widening the aperture for disruptors to move into the space.

In early March came news that former New York Yankees power hitter Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez and entrepreneur Marc Lore have raised $20 million — actually $30 million with their own funds and additional investments factored in — to launch a competing ticketing service called Jump.

See also: What the Taylor Swift Ticket Crash Says About Life in a Digital World

Bloomberg reported that “Rodriguez and Lore started considering the sector in 2020 when they tried to buy the New York Mets and got a look under the hood of a professional sports franchise. They concluded that there was a chance to improve overall economics by developing a service that caters to fans in the weeks running up to a game, during a match, and in the weeks afterwards.”

“As Alex and I began exploring ownership opportunities with sports teams, we spoke to industry execs and began seeing first-hand how many teams were missing the mark when it came to their fan experience,” Lore said in an email to Bloomberg. “We quickly realized that there were so many untapped opportunities to rethink the entire fan journey.”

On Monday (March 20) Sports Business Journal (SBJ) reported that the pair, along with CEO and Co-founder Jordy Leiser, “is trying to create an end-to-end fan experience platform,” adding that “Jump’s white-label software will connect all the various aspects of the live sports fan experience — parking, ticketing, merchandise, food, and beverage, as well as more creative aspects such as dynamic in-game ticketing or augmented reality activations.”

SBJ added that “for most teams and venues, the tech powering those segments of the live experience are usually siloed, causing operators to miss out on valuable data that could create a better fan experience through personalization and hit untapped revenue streams.”

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The trio isn’t alone in wanting a chunk of the estimated $9 billion that online event ticketing will generate in 2023. Marketplaces like StubHub provide a peer-to-peer ticket-selling service, similar to SeatGeek, a mobile platform offering P2P ticket sales as well as venue-direct tickets.

On Tuesday (March 21) relative newcomer TickPick announced “a secondary ticketing marketplace partnership with Major League Soccer’s (MLS) five-time MLS Cup champions, the LA Galaxy. The partnership, brokered by AEG Global Partnerships, makes TickPick an official partner of the LA Galaxy and will enable Galaxy fans to seamlessly purchase tickets to all 2023 regular season home games on the secondary market without added buyer fees, bringing customers significant savings when compared to the same seats offered by other secondary ticket marketplaces.”

AEG Worldwide is itself a huge presence in the events space as owner-operator of L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena, New York’s PlayStation Theater, and The O2 in London, among others.