Seatwave

» see seatwave.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In November 2006 Ticketmaster bought Biletix and became the company behind almost every concert ticket sold in Turkey. Six months earlier, in London, a former Ticketmaster executive named Joe Cohen had registered the company that Ticketmaster would eventually buy and then switch off. Seatwave and the Turkish deal are the two ends of the same twelve-year story, and only one end was visible from where I was sitting.

Cohen had come through Match.com and Ticketmaster before founding Seatwave in May 2006; the site started trading in February 2007. The pitch was a safe secondary market: anybody with a spare ticket could list it, and anybody buying one got a guarantee that it would be valid or the money came back. Investors liked that enough to put in $25 million in February 2008 under Fidelity Ventures and another $17 million in June 2009, which took the total to fifty-three million dollars.

The guarantee was genuine and the economics were fine. What Seatwave could not control was what the marketplace looked like from outside it, where a sold-out show reappeared at four times face value within ninety seconds of going on sale, and did it again the following week for a decade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the resale problem ~

British secondary ticketing spent the 2010s under a microscope. A parliamentary inquiry had already gone over the ground in 2007, and by the middle of the decade the Competition and Markets Authority was working the same seam as a campaign group backed by the music industry. The complaint underneath all of it was narrow and consistent: professional sellers with automated buying tools took the inventory before fans could reach it, then listed it back to those fans at a markup, on sites that described themselves as fan-to-fan.

~ what the touts did ~

Ticketmaster bought Seatwave's operating assets in November 2014 and ran it alongside Get Me In, its other resale brand. The CMA served an initial enforcement order on 5 December 2014 and cleared the deal on 26 March 2015. Seatwave's revenue was already sliding by then, from £7.68 million in 2013 to £6.39 million in 2014.

So the owner of the biggest primary ticketing operation in the country also owned two of the marketplaces where its tickets reappeared at a markup. That arrangement was defensible in a spreadsheet and indefensible in a select committee hearing, and it stayed that way for four years.

~ after the buyout ~

On 13 August 2018 Ticketmaster said both resale brands would close. "We know that fans are tired of seeing others snap up tickets just to resell for a profit on secondary websites, so we have taken action," the statement read, adding that closing the secondary sites "has always been our long-term plan". The replacement was an exchange inside Ticketmaster itself, where a seller can only list at the original price or below, and resold seats show up pink on the seating map instead of blue.

The closure was announced for October and landed on 27 November 2018, when the listings stopped. Today the apex domain returns a server error and the www host does not answer at all. StubHub and Viagogo carried on exactly as before, which tells you the pressure was on the brand rather than on the trade.

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