Venues in the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) portfolio are dropping their partnership with StubHub, which saw the eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) subsidiary serve as the official resale marketplace for those venues since 2012, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Venues affected by this change include the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Target Center in Minneapolis, T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, and many more.
The move mirrors a similar decision overseas earlier this year, as AEG opted out of its contract with StubHub in favor of a new platform managed by AXS, one which will feature a capped price system relative to the ticket’s face value. AXS, which is also managed by AEG, will also be the new marketplace of choice for AEG venues in the United States, which will mirror rival Ticketmaster’s single ecosystem for both primary and secondary tickets being displayed to consumers shopping for tickets to events at its venues. It is unclear whether or not price caps will be enforced in this market.
According to IQ-Mag, the platform – FanSight – will be powered by AXS’ Mobile ID technology, which will allow “a single source for guaranteed authentic tickets for 30 of its American venues.”
“AEG is always looking to deliver the best experience for fans and we needed a partner that both understands the complexities of the ticketing marketplace and has the technology to remove friction from the ticketing process,” says Dan Beckerman, CEO of AEG. “AXS’ patented Mobile ID technology and the FanSight unified marketplace was the obvious solution to streamline the entire experience of buying, selling and managing tickets for fans and our venues.”
The technology in place will reportedly be entirely digital, eliminating paper or PDF barcoded tickets. This allows for a streamlined system, but history shows such systems have been prone to serious issues from time to time – system processing and fan unfamiliarity with the mobile-only ticketer led to massive lines at the gates of the Houston Rodeo earlier this year, while a March failure in the system led to many fans being locked out of a Houston Rockets game for much of the first quarter.
Such technology also allows for a massive data harvesting operation to be conducted on its users, though the operators of that technology and their clients consider that to be a feature rather than a bug. From the Wall Street Journal:
To be able to track tickets—and the people buying them—AXS says it will now tie every ticket sold to the purchaser’s identity. Each customer will have their own AXS account through which tickets can be bought, sold or transferred to other customers.
That means that venues, teams and artists can know a lot more about who is walking in the door at events.
“This lets you go from knowing a third of the people in the building to potentially everybody in the building regardless of if they bought it on primary or on resale,” says Mr. Perez.
StubHub took the loss of its integration in stride, at least publicly, saying that it will still be fine for users to transfer tickets using StubHub’s marketplace, despite the loss of the official status of the relationship. “We will continue to list tickets for AEG events and venues globally,” Perkins Miller, StubHub’s general manager for North America told the the Journal.
Photo: By Prayitno from Los Angeles, USA – Staples Center, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27389512