US firm AXS to shake up Australian concert ticket sales
Backed by Frontier Touring, a new competitor will soon enter a ticketing market currently dominated by two major players in Ticketmaster and Ticketek.
As the Australian live music sector steels itself for its first full-scale summer tour season since 2019, a new competitor will soon enter a ticketing market currently dominated by two major players, Ticketmaster and Ticketek.
An American company named AXS, pronounced “access”, will launch a local office next month while seeking to agitate the market by offering a paperless, mobile-first solution that claims to include industry-leading technology for dealing with pain points felt by consumers, including mobile outages and fraudulent ticket sales on the secondary market.
Los Angeles-based AXS chief executive Bryan Perez said that the ticketing market here was “dominated by two things: one is a bit of a duopoly, from a provisioning standpoint, and the other one is the nature of exclusive contracts”.
“We feel like there’s an opportunity for a third major player to come in, but we don’t want to just come in and do business the same old way,” Mr Perez said.
“We think that there’s a new and better business model out there, where ticketing may be a little bit more non-exclusive and open.”
Founded in 2011, AXS is owned by US company AEG, which in 2019 formed a joint venture with Melbourne-based concert promoter Frontier Touring, under the Mushroom Group.
The new entrant will face stiff competition here, as Ticketmaster and Ticketek – owned by multinational companies Live Nation and TEG, respectively – together sell the vast majority of tickets nationally. Ticketmaster also bought Moshtix in 2019, while independent Australian company Oztix works directly with other events and venues.
“We’ve been frustrated by the ticketing landscape for probably five or six years,” said Dion Brant, chief executive at Frontier Touring. “We don’t get to choose who sells our tickets in 90 per cent of cases; we go into a building, which has a contracted partner – and usually that contract’s for five years, at least, and the ticketing companies bid ferociously for those contracts.
“I feel like that dynamic takes away from the incentive for the ticketing companies to really invest in their people, and invest in the service. That’s what’s created this situation, where we think it’s done really poorly. We think the time is right to help AXS come into Australia and, if nothing else, shake it up.”
The company sells about $US3.5bn worth of tickets to more than 30,000 events each year, and its clients include the annual Coachella music and arts festival, as well as venues including Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, London’s O2 Arena and Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, which is home to the city’s two NBA teams, the Lakers and Clippers, among other sports.
Of his established rivals here, Perez said with a laugh, “I don’t think they’ll be surprised that we’re entering the market; they may ask, ‘What took you so long?’ I think they’ll know that they have to be on their game, because there’s a new competitor in town, and that’s going to be good for everyone.”
AXS will appoint an Australian chief executive early next year, and seek meetings with stakeholders in the live sector.
Meanwhile, after three years of Covid delays, an intensely busy summer touring schedule will see the nation’s live music workers banding together like never before.
In Review, interviews with senior industry members reveal a situation so extraordinary that the biggest touring companies are sharing information and resources through necessity.
Pooled efforts from the three major players in Live Nation, Frontier and TEG include the surprising creation of a logistics spreadsheet that tracks truck, stage and sound equipment movements, so that they might all survive a very trying period faced by a depleted workforce.
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