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Dice founder outlines motivations for new ticketing service
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 17 October 2014
The founder of new mobile-based ticketing platform Dice has been discussing his company’s mission in the new CMU Digest Report, following the service’s London launch last month. Looking to shake up the ticketing space, Dice aims to offer promoters and managers the kind of data access you get from direct-to-fan ticketing platforms, but also to be very much a hub in itself, with in-house editors recommending gigs. Wholly mobile-based, it also stands out by charging no booking fees.
Former artist and label manager Phil Hutcheon says of the ticketing sector he is entering: “We need transparency. We need it to be much easier for fans to discover and buy tickets. I was constantly inundated with ticketing companies asking to sell tickets for our artists but none of them were providing a service that made a significant difference. So the big motivation was how do we create a ticketing service that fans actually like – maybe even love? What would that look like? You look at Uber and how it has transformed transportation. How do we do the same for ticketing?”
Noting his past frustrations, as an artist manager, with traditional ticketing agencies, he goes on: “Artists hire managers to look after their business, but I wasn’t able to do that properly from the ticketing data I received. What was I supposed to do with CSV files with email addresses? What we need is business intelligence that helps us plan tours and grow fanbases by engaging with fans properly. How do we work out cities, countries, supports and venues using data? If we sell out a show should we do another one? These are pretty basic questions and Dice has a lot of incredible data behind it; we’re using that to make ticketing smart”.
The ‘no booking fees’ thing is, of course, particularly significant. How will Dice make money? “Our aim is to get fans to use Dice as their primary service to discover gigs and buy tickets”, says Hutcheon. “If you look at the best tech companies they build audiences and then work out monetisation. Our investors are smart and it’s about scale. While we’re beginning in London we want to roll out fairly quickly around the world. When you do that the money side works itself out. The exciting thing is seeing it work already – in the first week we sold out both the Red Bull Culture Clash at Earls Court and had the exclusive pre-orders for the biggest Glass Animals show to date. Both cheaper than anywhere else for fans”.
Dice is now operational in London, with new functionality planned to go live pretty much every two weeks. More info at dice.fm.
The latest edition of the CMU Digest Report also considers copyright ownership data challenges, how copyright could be better communicated, Google’s role in combating piracy and NDA culture in the digital music space. You can download the PDF report for £9.99 from the CMU Shop.
CMU Digest subscribers received a link to download their copies in last week’s weekly email bulletin. To receive twelve copies of the Report plus a weekly news digest and other benefits for just £50 a year, become a CMU Digest subscriber by clicking here.
