Mark Yovich is ultimately responsible for 60 million tickets across 14 territories every year. No pressure, then.
As international president of Ticketmaster, the affable Aussie’s naturally laid back demeanour gives one clue as to how he keeps his cool with quite such hefty culpability on his shoulders.
But there’s another reason for Yovich’s unflappability: Ticketmaster’s owner, Live Nation, has committed $100m over the next three years to upgrade TM’s systems and infrastructure to boost its mobile-friendliness, its cost-effectiveness and, ultimately, its global market share.
That will mean new, industry-leading platforms for Ticketmaster, says Yovich, as well as its two affiliates - indie ticket hub TicketWeb and the company’s own entity in the controversial secondary ticketing market, GetMeIn.
Yovich can’t help but fail to hide a grin when Music Week mentions Live Nation’s recent legal result in an arbitration case against CTS-Eventim dating back to 2010.
LN was last month cleared of any liability related to cancelling its ticketing software licence with CTS, after it acquired and switched to Ticketmaster. The company avoided what could have been a very damaging payout.
Since then Live Nation has already launched Ticketmaster in Austria - signalling a new-found freedom to stretch east across Europe.
The 39-year-old Yovich is left slightly more exasperated when discussing the problem of ticket- snaffling ‘bots’ - the automated programmes used by professional ticket ‘scalpers’ to beat legitimate customers to thousands of tickets during an on-sale period, only to flog them on the secondary market afterwards for huge mark-ups.
However committed Ticketmaster is to outmaneuvering these dodgy dealers, though, Yovich says the company is committed to the resale market - where he says his company can add value back into the music industry, unlike its independent secondary ticketing rivals.
The ability for customers to buy, share and use tickets on their mobiles is becoming increasingly prevalent, and Yovich says Ticketmaster’s new technology will accommodate the trend wherever consumers and promoters demand it. The same goes for ‘dynamic pricing’; the system of ticket pricing that ‘smartly’ makes the best seats expensive and the cheap seats extra-cheap.
Ultimately, however, Yovich says that Ticketmaster’s biggest recent evolution has had little to do with tech and everything to do with making itself more transparent and, frankly, useful to both fans and all corners of the music industry...
You’ve been at Ticketmaster for two years now, after hopping over from Live Nation. What are the headline changes you’ve seen at the company?
Transparency to fans is the No.1 thing, including fees associated with Ticketmaster, trying to be open about why they’re there. Maybe fans haven’t always seen the value we provide to them, so we’re trying to do a better job of showing that. Also, we’re being more open within the industry - talking to promoters and agents, managers, artists and labels a lot more than we ever did before. Perhaps we were a little too corporate. We’re the market leader - we want to have a lot more say in industry discussions.
Have you noticed the trend of labels moving more into live - but also live promoters like AEG or Live Nation taking on an artist A&R or marketing role?
Yes. We’ve made a real effort to reach out to labels and managers, certainly in the last two years. We’ve got an artist services team here and they do amazing things: their job is to go out and speak to the agent/manager/label sectors and ask them, rather than just being a service provider, how we can partner with them and understand what the artist is trying to achieve.
A good example is our working with management on the Robbie Williams shows [the star’s recent tour used Ticketmaster paperless tickets and collected data for ie: Music]. We have signed deals with Universal, Warners and now Sony too, where we’re helping them all shift product. We can do a pretty good job on that - and we can help them gather data, or directly for artists and managers. During the Rihanna tour last year we sold 20,000 albums through Ticketmaster - that was 20% of that album’s opening week’s sales, which was amazing. This year so far we’re about 25% up year-on-year in shifting music products.
How can you help turn a ticket-buying fan into an album-buying fan?
?It’s a difficult process because most people just want the ticket, especially for a really hot artist. But we have lots of data, so there’s lots of marketing activity we can do after the on-sale. We work with the artists and labels on that. The reach that we’ve got makes it pretty easy for us to get to a lot of people. It’s a balance between getting the ticket into their hand, as well as selling them merchandise or albums.
There’s long been criticism around the lack of co-operative marketing between labels with a record to sell and promoters with a tour to sell. Is that changing from your perspective?
That was certainly true back in the day. It seems to be changing, perhaps there’s a little bit more respect for each other than there was in the past. Everyone just wants to be seen as a partner to the artist and help them achieve their goals.
How much autonomy do you have at Ticketmaster away from Live Nation and its agendas, considering you’re owned by them??
Complete independence. We’re two different businesses: they book the bands, we sell the tickets. We talk regularly. On the top of that at the Live Nation Entertainment level, [Live Nation CEO] Michael Rapino and those guys, they really set a great vision for us as a company. That’s what led both businesses to innovate, and be more transparent and open. The really good thing that came out of the merger for Ticketmaster was the leadership at the highest level.
Winning a No Liability judgment in the CTS case must have been a great result for everyone...?
Yeah, but it was what we expected. We didn’t think there would be any other correct outcome. It’s just good to get it out of the way - let’s just move on so we can continue to focus on growing the business.
There could have been hundreds of millions paid out in the worst-case scenario, though. It’s quite a bump in the road to get over.?
Yeah, that’s fair to say. Despite us expecting this result, it was an unknown and there was an element of speculation. Now we can absolutely move on and grow the business, as you’ve seen with us recently launching in Austria. It’s in CTS’s region, so it gives them another new competitor out there. We’re very keen to expand and grow the business. We’re always looking at new opportunities, especially where we have an existing Live Nation business and we have access to tickets. There’s other countries in Europe we’re looking at. Wherever it makes sense, whether it’s an acquisition or organic, we’ll be there.
Is there still a reputational problem for ticketing companies, especially those of your size - and especially when it comes to fees??
Michael Rapino said it: we became used to playing the villain. He is very keen to position us as fan-first and fan-friendly and promote more of the good stuff that we do. Look, I’m a customer: I know it sucks having these fees that all-of-a-sudden appear at the end of a transaction from an e-commerce point of view. At least showing them earlier in the process is a step in the right direction, and we’ve done that in all of our countries now.
What about the printing at home fees?
It sucks. We know customers hate it, I hate it. I’ve told my guys to get rid of it, to find a way to remove it. In the US, Nathan Hubbard [Ticketmaster CEO] has successfully eradicated it from a bunch of their events over there. But it is complicated. It’s not as easy as just turning it off because there’s a whole bunch of clients involved - we have to negotiate it on a per-client basis.
This summer all of the shows at the Olympic Park, the Live Nation shows, TicketFast [Ticketmaster’s print-at-home service]? is free, and it’s the same for the shows we’ve just done are free. For me, it’s a mandate to try and find a way to remove this to 100%. But it’s not as easy as just turning it off.
How realistic is it that the print-at-home fee will go and not just be folded in somewhere else??
It is realistic. The way it works in the UK now we have an order processing fee and a delivery charge. A per-order fee pays for some of the services - the access control, contact centres and all of the infrastructure we put in place. Many years ago we wrapped that into a delivery charge and called it a per-order fee. If you split it out again, you present it differently to the customer. They can see there’s an order fee, but it pays for some of the services they get. It’s going to be difficult but we can find a way.
What are your biggest bugbears about your relationships with agents, managers etc. and what aspects of those relationships can you improve?
Communication. Talk to us if you’ve got artists in town. I admit, we’ve got to be more proactive in talking to agents and managers ourselves. Also, don’t just think of us as the check-out at the end of the value chain. We can partner with you and try and achieve your objectives, whether you’re the label, promoter, agent or manager. Historically we’ve always had close relationships with promoters, that’s our daily business, but we haven’t always had relationships with the other three sectors I mention.
The feedback we’ve had from [companies] after we’ve communicated with them is: ‘God, we’ve never heard from you guys in 10 years - it’s great you’ve come into the building and let’s keep the dialogue happening.’ We achieved the Robbie Williams deal with management and label relationships that have led to things like the Rihanna [album] up-sells.
Do you encounter cynicism from independent promoters who are wary of your setup??
Of course. That goes with the territory of being ?the market leader. Some people want to be independent or anti-establishment. Again, we want to pierce that perception that we’re a corporate beast or an inflexible entity, who only deals with the biggest in the market.
Does Live Nation make deals with agents on your behalf - and tell them they can get the best terms with their ticketing partner? Can you reassure other promoters who are in competition with Live Nation that you’d give them fair treatment?
Absolutely. Live Nation gets no special treatment. I have 10,000 clients to look after. Live Nation is one of those and a big and important one. Because we’re part of the same company there are things we do together, not on pricing but on the fan experience all the way through the process. But on price it’s a level playing field - almost to the point that we over-compensate. It varies by country, there’s perhaps some more speculation in some territories than others about that particular issue. But we don’t see it as an issue at all [in the UK].
Are concert prices still increasing?
The widely held view is that they’re continuing to creep up.?It’s interesting because of the economic climate. Maybe there was a trajectory earlier that was in that direction, but what we’re seeing across the board generally on tickets is that there’s more resistance to price in the market - our clients are more aware of it. Generally prices are trending down a little bit across the board. In music, production costs have gotten much more expensive than they were before for the big blockbuster gigs.
As an industry, pricing is probably something we don’t do a very good job of - hence the resale market existing. Pricing things [in line] with supply and demand is not necessarily a promoter’s - or any client’s - greatest skill, but they’re trying to be better at it and we at Ticketmaster are giving them a bunch of tools to get better at it, using the data we’ve got and some self-service tools to dynamically price.
In the US, we’ve had some of those products in place for about a year now. We’re trying to roll some out over here as well. When it comes to dynamically pricing things, sports teams have been doing it well for a lot longer than music guys. We need to do better at it, otherwise there’s just going to be a bigger resale market and the players in the industry aren’t necessarily going to participate in that revenue.
What could the music industry learn from the sports market’s ticketing setup in your view?
It’s changing over here, with some [secondary ticketing companies] doing deals with Premiership clubs. In the US, the resale market is primarily sports - 75% are sports tickets. If anything, they’ve developed the [secondary] market, understood it and embraced that it’s good for fans. It helps them dynamically price using market forces. So long as they participate in it and control it, that’s key.
What about anti-resale legislation in sports?
There’s legislation for the Olympics and some of the crown jewel events and a little bit for football in relation to security. But apart from that, the secondary marketplaces are doing good business. The genie seems to be out of the bottle and that business is growing. For us the most important thing is getting tickets into the hands of fans first. We spend a lot of money fighting unfair access to tickets; bots, anything giving unfair access to tickets whereby fans are forced out.
We spend millions of dollars fighting bots. The on-sale for a large-scale event is amazing. It’s a constant arms race and it’s because of inefficient pricing. The people wouldn’t be so desperate to get their hands on these tickets if pricing was better. Look, if [the industry] wants to stop it, stop it - paperless ticketing is one of those tools that can do that. We push that as well, with clients that want to do that. We absolutely love doing it if someone like Radiohead wants to get tickets in the hands of fans in the front row for £50 - we can help them do that with paperless.
If they want to restrict tickets going onto sites where the people in the [industry] supply chain aren’t going to participate in the revenue uplift, we can use paperless in conjunction with Platinum, which is our internal market-driven dynamic pricing done manually - people looking at the ‘net and changing the price on an hourly basis. Those two work really well together. It’s about whatever the artist wants to achieve. That’s why getting in front of agents and managers early on is really important.
That’s a less cynical way of looking at it than we’re used to: do you think it’s sometimes genuinely just a lack of planning from artists and managers that’s to blame for secondary ticketing’s dominance?
Yes, absolutely. That’s what we’re trying to do by being open and being a thought leader in this industry; trying to tackle this problem - if indeed that’s what it is. Perhaps it’s just part of doing business in live entertainment these days. We’re trying to understand the goals of each artist, which could be about data capture, locking [resale] down with paperless or catching the lift [in pricing] using Platinum. On the other hand, some artists are fine to let it be open.
You’ve got your own secondary ticketing service, GetMeIn, which I’m sure you’ll say is legitimised. Is it a frustration to you that there are perhaps less ‘legitimate’ resale operators doing well, that don’t actually hand value back to the industry??
Whether it’s us or other people running those marketplaces where tickets are traded, there’s no way to offer value back to the artist unless the artist’s team is going to speak to them. Googling concert tickets is a shitty experience for customers. It’s broken. For example, the Pink tour has done amazingly well in Australia - but when you Google Pink tickets, hundreds of sites will say they have them. My mum, for instance, wouldn’t know not to click on fraudulent, illegitimate ticket sites, and that makes it a shitty customer experience right now. Having legitimate [secondary] marketplaces is a way to clean that up.
The primary sites - us included - don’t provide much value after the on-sale because there are no good seats left. If you ask a fan, they don’t know what a primary and a secondary ticket is, they just want to go to the show, and they want safe options to allow them to do so. That’s what we’re trying to do; give everyone all their safe options in one place.
Dumb question: can’t you just throw a load of money at Google Ads, get to the top of the search rankings and bury the dodgy sites?
Google loves secondary ticketing for that very reason - it’s a battlefield of ad words. No-one’s going to win by fighting, you have to try and embrace it, work with artists directly and try and understand their goals. We provide a safe marketplace for people that do want to get tickets without queuing up at 9am on a Friday morning. There is an audience of people that want good seats and those marketplaces provide a service. It’s not going to go away.
You must be on a mission to dominate Google as much as anybody else??
No, we’re not. We can use our Ticketmaster site and reach to drive traffic to [GetMeIn]. Like I said, when people come to our site and can’t get a ticket, we want to be able to provide them with a place that they can get one. We’ve just got to make sure people are educated.
How far along the road are we in the UK to eliminating fraudulent ticket sites??
We have a long way to go. It really sucks, it drives us crazy when people turn up to venues thinking they’re going to have a life-changing experience watching their favourite band and they can’t get into the show. It goes back to Googling concert tickets with all of these fraudulent sites all over the place. We need to do a better job of talking to fans and explaining ‘only buy from safe places’. And working with law enforcement agencies to bust the bad guys.
We’ve launched a lawsuit in America where we’re taking 21 parties to court because we [believe we] have evidence that they were accessing tickets in an unfair way. We also got Wiseguys a slap on the wrist in 2010. [Wiseguys illegally used computer scripts to bypass Ticketmaster’s Captcha gate, accessing thousands of tickets ahead of genuine consumers and then reselling them to a big profit.]
These were legitimate tickets, but they were cheating to get them. We’re spending a lot of money fighting these guys. If someone gets a ticket and wants to resell it, fine - so long as it’s legitimate and they got it in a legitimate way. We’re not going to give up this fight, and that’s maybe something we don’t talk enough about.
What proportion of tickets to your average stadium or arena show are snapped up by bots??
It varies a lot, but it’s a growing percentage. Year- on-year, it’s growing dramatically.
What are we talking? 20%? 30%?
It’s impossible to look at an average percentage across all events. The amount of bot traffic varies wildly by show, and we deflect a large proportion of it. We have teams of people working across our four primary technical defences which include Captcha, Cookie Q, proxy blocking and IP management. Then our fraud teams investigates and blocks erroneous or suspicious transactions, which often results in the cancelling of those orders and the tickets placed back onto our system for fans to buy.
Rather than looking at percentages we can say that in some cases - for example the recent UK Beyonce on-sales, we were blocking in the region of 120,000 bot visits during the on-sale. Again it is worth mentioning that this is symptomatic of any ecommerce business, and having sophisticated and proven safeguards against illegitimate traffic is key to providing a safe environment for transactions by real customers. It costs us a lot to fight bots and they’re not going to go away.
That’s why we have that Captcha word, which everybody hates and I hate too. It sucks because it hurts our conversion, but when you look at some of our competitors, they don’t even have that basic security gate. We’re working on some technologies to replace Captcha, doing different things on mobile, especially with some of the push notification technology that helps us identify when it’s a real person, not software.
When dynamic pricing was first trialled in the US there was a bit of public aversion - scary media headlines. Is there a fear amongst managers and agents? Do they need to reconsider their view of it?
They’re all different. Some will forever have an aversion to it and want to get all their tickets out there for £50, no matter where they sit. Our main [UK platform] for dynamic pricing is this Platinum tool that we have. We’ve seen a massive take-up in the past 18 months.
We’re pushing it a little bit more as a way to combat resale and we’ve had all kinds of artists sign up. In the US, we’ve also developed a software tool called Pricemaster and they can do it themselves. That’s seen amazing take-up, especially in sports. You can have 30 or 40 price-points across the house, and it allows you to offer a bunch of much cheaper seats compared to what came before.
There’s sensitivity from a press point of view and some of our markets are a lot more nervous about it, especially where there’s economic headwinds. But I haven’t really seen any negative coverage. As far as I’m concerned, all that revenue goes back to the industry and the artist.
Are there plans to bring Pricemaster to the UK?
Absolutely. I’m desperately on their case to send it to us. It’s still in beta phase - they have hundreds of clients using it in North America.
Because you’ve got GetMeIn, some people might assume you’re not a paperless ticketing fan. If all of the music managers and agents in the UK told you tomorrow they wanted to go paperless, would you have a problem with it?
No. Not at all. It’s about what the managers’ objectives are. If they want to stop touts, paperless is the best way to do it with the technology we have now - and we’re continuing to develop that technology. We’re trying to get paperless into many more countries now.
It’s a great tool, and the response from fans is that they love it. There’s a lot of propaganda about paperless being bad for fans - especially in the US - and I don’t understand that at all. We’ve got to get out there and tell people why it’s a good thing. Some fans say, ‘If I can’t go, I’ll be stuck with my ticket.’ We work with those people. We find a way. Mobile and digital ticketing will help a lot with that. Fans want to do three things with a ticket: buy it, sell it or pass it to their friends.
Where does music sit in terms of importance versus sport or theatre etc. within Ticketmaster??
I’m not going to get pulled into that conversation! It’s hugely important. It’s the biggest sector for us as a business in ticketing. Plus we’re part of Live Nation Entertainment, and we’re music fans - but we’re sports and theatre fans too.