Two Australian festivals have revealed that they have been impacted by the collapse of US ticketing company Lyte, with one reckoning that it will lose AUS$30,000.
Meanwhile two American festivals which have already sued Lyte for money they are owed have issued statements clarifying how they used Lyte’s secondary ticketing marketplace. This comes after a Billboard report implied they were touting, or scalping, their own tickets for profit. Both insist that wasn’t the case.
Lyte offered both primary and secondary ticketing services, with Australian festivals Rabbits Eat Lettuce and Lost Paradise both using Lyte for primary ticketing. According to Pollstar, Rabbits Eat Lettuce promoter Erik Lamir told radio station Triple J that he has now switched to an Australian ticketing platform after his experience with Lyte, which he says turned out to be a company which could “talk the talk, but - in the end - they didn’t walk the walk”.
Lamir explained that he started looking for an alternative ticketing provider after his festival’s Lyte-powered ticketing page went down in mid-September. He subsequently discovered that Lyte was in the process of falling apart. “Fortunately”, he added, “there was a skeleton crew still left in Lyte that have hung around long enough to at least provide us with all of the ticketing data”.
He is now working with Humantix and, having got access to the Lyte data, all the tickets previously sold for his event have been transferred over to the new system. However, he doesn't expect to see the AUS$30,000 he is owed by Lyte.
Lost Paradise published a statement via social media last week saying “our ticketing platform, Lyte, is currently offline”. Noting the news coverage of Lyte’s collapse, it added, “communication with Lyte’s senior team has not helped us understand exactly what has happened”.
The festival then said, “We are taking this situation seriously as we do everything we can to protect and understand the impact this will have on ticket holders. We are looking to have a resolution to share with you soon. In the meantime, all sales of our accommodation upgrades, parking passes and VIP upgrades remain on hold”.
The two US festivals named in Billboard’s report, Lost Lands and North Coast Music Festival, are owed a total of nearly $700,000 by Lyte, with both launching legal action to try to recover some of that money. Their respective lawsuits provided some insight on recent events at Lyte and also how the festivals were using its secondary ticketing marketplace.
As well as using Lyte as an official resale platform for ticket-buyers, both Lost Lands and the North Coast Music Festival also directly sold tickets via Lyte’s secondary marketplace, which prompted Billboard’s initial report stating that the festivals were touting their own tickets.
Some promoters have made use of secondary ticketing platforms to directly sell tickets in the past, the outcome being something like the dynamic pricing system now employed on primary ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster. Where there is high demand for tickets, prices go up and the promoter benefits from the uplift. Where demand is low, prices go down, but the promoter can still ensure a decent number of tickets are sold.
Of course, use of secondary ticketing and dynamic pricing can be controversial, and both festivals have been keen to clarify how they actually used Lyte’s marketplace.
Lost Lands says that it used the Lyte marketplace to sell tickets that became available late in the day when festival-goers who had been paying in installments didn’t complete their payment plans. “There were a very small number of tickets released in this process due to the event being sold out”, the festival’s organiser explained in a social media post.
Lyte, as the official resale partner of the festival, “had a significant waitlist of people hoping to attend the event”, so rather than selling those late-in-the-day tickets via its primary ticket agent, “we fulfilled a few hundred tickets to this waitlist on Lyte at final tier pricing”.
Billboard originally reported that the North Coast Music Festival directly sold nearly 3000 tickets via Lyte’s marketplace, sharing any mark-up on the tickets sold 50/50 with the ticketing company. Of course, with Lyte’s collapse, the festival hasn’t actually received any payments from Lyte, hence its legal action.
However, the festival insists that those tickets were actually sold at face value or less, with the festival’s promoter meant to share in Lyte’s fees rather than any ticket price mark-up. An update to Billboard’s story says this was done “to ensure buyers who wished to use the secondary market would receive valid tickets”.