The Ticketfly co-founder and former president of TicketWeb, Dan Teree, has launched a new ticketing platform, Big Neon, which he hopes to have powered by Tari blockchain technology in 2020.
Teree departed from Ticketfly in 2013, two years before it was acquired by Pandora and then sold to Eventbrite. However, as of last month, Eventbrite announced that it plans to phase-out the Ticketfly brand, replacing it with a new platform dubbed Eventbrite Music. Teree believes his platform will compete with Eventbrite, telling Billboard that “ticketing companies are consolidating and getting bigger, but not necessarily better.”
“[Eventbrite is] still busy integrating, so it’s hard to move the dial on innovation quickly,” he said. “We’re going to be building brand new, highly-focused applications in a secure language and cruising through development while they’re doing client and data migrations and trying to do gap analysis on how [they] deep six the Ticketfly platform.”
While the Tari protocol is still in development, Teree said they’ll release Big Neon now and will chain-enable it once the Tari protocol is “live and in the wild.” The platform will allow a mobile-only ticket solution, allowing promoters to build shows and check ticket counts, while engaging better with fans.
The blockchain is open-source, so other ticketing companies around the world will have access to Big Neon’s database to build their own third-party distribution networks. Teree sees the platform as being the first ticketing company to combine the primary and secondary markets with blockchain technology. He told Celebrity Access that Big Neon is “the biggest innovation in the ticketing industry since the first ticket was sold online.”
So far, the company has reportedly secured multi-year, multi-million dollar ticketing contracts within the U.S. and has around 300,000 tickets under contract. Big Neon has also confirmed two current Ticketfly and Eventbrite clients, Washington D.C.’s Blisspop Productions and the San Francisco club Public Works, as Big Neon adopters.
“I’m pretty damn confident the Big Neon team will deliver more innovation and genuine customer service in their first year than the other ticketing companies have in the last decade,” Public Works founder Jeff Whitmore said in a press release. “The industry can use a good swift kick in the $%#!. My money is on Big Neon to provide that kick.”
