This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Live Business
Dice raises $122 million in new finance
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 27 September 2021
Ticketing company Dice has announced that it has raised another $122 million in lovely funding via an investment round led by SoftBank and involving the likes of Future Shape, Cassius and Evolution. All your favourite financiers!
“We believe Dice’s technology has the capacity to transform the future of live entertainment”, says Yanni Pipilis, Managing Partner for SoftBank Investment Advisers. “Alongside the flexibility and security of seamless ticketing, the platform connects fans, artists and venues in a completely new way… We are excited to partner with Dice to help create remarkable event experiences for fans all over the world”.
How will Dice spend all this new money? A big old party? COVID tests all round? A free steak dinner for any enthusiastic music business journalists feeling a bit hungry? Maybe.
But mainly Dice “will significantly grow the company by expanding reach to artists, fans and venues, while hiring new team members, adding to its live stream offering, and launching an ambitious artist development program that will see the platform work with even more artists directly on their live strategy”. Good times!
“Dice is rewiring the live experiences industry. We have proven that if you treat fans well, they go out more”, says founder and CEO Phil Hutcheon. “We’re overhauling an unfair, inefficient system by pioneering a transparent, data-led, fan-first approach – building a scalable ecosystem that helps artists, promoters and venues thrive. To have SoftBank as a partner enables us to expand into every market”.
In addition to the new investors, Dice has also added a new board member in the form of Tony Fadell, who heads up Future Shape and is best known as the inventor of the iPod. For younger readers, the iPod was a bit like those record players you all like so much, but used these things called MP3s instead of vinyl records, and was much less inconvenient.
“The concert business is a tangled mess of archaic tools and taxing ‘industry standards’ where artists are paid last”, Fadell says. “Venues shell out for marketing and are beholden to ticket conglomerates. Fans have to hunt for shows and regularly buy overpriced tickets from secondary markets or scalpers. This doesn’t make sense!”
“Dice re-engineers the entire live industry, not just a part of it”, he goes on. “Venues are connected to fans and artists. Artists get transparency, access and control. Fans easily discover local shows and global live streams, and buy scalper-safe tickets with a single click. I’m ecstatic to be joining the Dice board and to be part of another entertainment revolution”.
