Up-and-coming primary ticket company TicketFly, which counts the Merriweather Post Pavilion and the 9:30 Club among its clients, is looking to sign a deal with at least one secondary ticket company that would act as a sales channel partner.
TicketFly CEO Andrew Dreskin told TicketNews that he believes it only makes sense for his company to utilize the sales reach of the secondary market to help sell tickets, but he was quick to add that the relationship would have unique terms. Namely, that the broker sites would sell tickets for the same face value price as TicketFly, instead of at the premium that brokers often charge.
Only two years old, TicketFly has already signed up 50 venue and promoter clients for which it handles ticketing operations, but it needs ways to get the tickets it sells in front of more people in order to compete with market giant Live Nation Entertainment (Ticketmaster).
“The major secondary ticket sites enjoy a lot of Web traffic, so they’ll make great sales channels for us,” Dreskin said, adding that he hopes to have the deal in place before the end of the year. “Since folks are already shopping on those sites for tickets, it makes sense for us to list inventory there.”
Dreskin would not disclose which secondary companies he plans to approach, or when exactly he hopes to sign the first deal, but he looks at the partnership as being only one of several new developments for TicketFly in 2010.
The company just successfully completed its first ticketed event at the Merriweather, the May 1 show by My Morning Jacket, where Dreskin estimates fans saved close to 30 percent per ticket on service fees compared to Ticketmaster. The service fees were a flat $7 for the Merriweather show, compared to an average of $10 for a Ticketmaster event.
In addition, the company is rolling out a bar code ticket system, where fans can have tickets sent to their cell phones and the bar codes from those tickets can be read off of the cell phone screen by a device at the venue. So far, 10 of TicketFly’s venue clients have offer the feature, but Dreskin expects 90 percent of their clients to adopt the technology this year.
“There’s a whole segment of the industry that’s not interested in Live Nation selling their tickets, because they’re ready for a change and want more control over their ticketing. So, the merger has helped our business quite a bit,” Dreskin said.
