Twickets Australia’s Danny Hannaford: “The ticketing market is a little broken everywhere”

UK-based ticket resale platform Twickets launched in Australia this week, with a special landing page for Ed Sheeran’s Australian tour tickets unveiled yesterday and then an official launch of the full site this morning. (Read the news story here for more details.) It’s nothing but good news for Aussie music fans and venues, as Twickets’ sales model – which doesn’t allow tickets to be sold for more than face value – is specifically designed to bypass scalpers, allowing people to pass on their spare tickets to genuine fans who missed out the first time.

TMN spoke to Twickets Australia’s Managing Director Danny Hannaford, who has nearly a decade’s experience in live music ticketing in the UK, about the broken state of ticketing worldwide, how Twickets works to benefit real fans and stump scalpers, and why the secondary ticketing sector needs to do better.

Why Australia and why now? Why are we the second market that Twickets are going out to?

Funnily enough, I was kind of already on my way out here when I was kind of looking at jobs and the ticketing industry in particular. [I’ve] worked in ticketing for nearly a decade now, mainly in live music events, and I noticed that there was quite a lot of scalping issues that had happened and I’d known Richard [Davies], our CEO in Twickets the UK for a while and just dropped him an email… And it turned out that it was very much high on the list of priorities for Twickets.

I think it’s been brewing in the UK for quite a long time and Twickets has been there for a little while but it just appears that it’s hit boiling point in Australia now.

One of the things about the ticketing market over here is the duopoly between Ticketek and Ticketmaster. Is that something that exists in the UK as well, that dominance by a couple of companies?

Yeah, you’ve still got the same kind of dominance but I think it’s a lot more difficult in Australia because of the exclusivity deals between the venues and the agents themselves. In the UK, you’ve got potentially up to 10 pretty good agents that you’re allowed to allocate out to – so within the venues in the UK, the venue will usually keep the majority allocation for a show but then the promoter will be free to allocate, you know, somewhere between around 25 to 50 per cent depending on the show, out to their own agents.

So you’ve got Ticketmaster there, which are obviously the big one pretty much worldwide. We’ve got another company, See Tickets, but in terms of how strict it is, it’s not as strict as it is here, which provides its own challenges in itself with secondary ticketing, I think.

What could we be doing better over here in ticketing that is actually working well in the UK??

To be honest, I think the ticketing market is a little broken everywhere at the moment. The primary side of things is great – we obviously need more legislation around scalping and bots and trying to target that sort of stuff to try and weed out any people that are selling on tickets just for the profit at the moment. I mean, it’s pricing out fans.

I think in the long term it’s also affecting music venues and artists when it comes to merch sales and drinks sales on the night. I think there is a responsibility worldwide. I mean there are some good initiatives in the UK, like [when] you can only pick up your tickets on the door.

I don’t think there’s much different in the way we do the ticketing in the UK if I’m completely honest. I think it’s just that things need to catch up a little bit and more needs to be enforced, you know, more names on tickets for events, so you can’t pass the tickets over somewhere else unjustly. Everyone still needs to have an ability to move on a ticket if they need to but as far as we’re concerned, it should never be more than face value.

How do you think the parliamentary inquiry in the UK was going, before they had to call it off due to the snap election?

I think it was going pretty well. I mean, things are moving quite nicely now. It seems that they’re listening.

I think now that the artists are starting to speak up more, we’re getting a lot more traction and there’s a lot more people in the government that are actually starting to think, okay well, maybe this is becoming a little bit of an issue, we need to potentially look at all the legislation around it. So it’s starting to move now, and like I said, with the ban on bots coming in imminently, it’s a step in the right direction, and we just hope that it can go a little bit further and start helping out the industry a little bit more rather than it just being kind of brushed to the side.

How does the active monitoring process work and how do you flag a user, for example, who you suspect is actively scalping?

We’ve got a manual process within our system. So if the seller comes to our website to add an event, it goes into a queue of tickets that basically someone in our company, we’ve got a bunch of moderators that go into the site and they check out every single ticket that’s listed. So every ticket that’s listed is registered to, you know, it’s got a certain credit card, it’s got an address, it’s got a name, all that sort of stuff, and basically we will check those details constantly. So we work on a three-strike rule. If there’s any issues that come up, you know if someone has been selling far too often for a lot of different gigs, we may well think that they might be a scalper.

Now, they’re obviously selling at face value, so they’re technically not doing anything wrong, but we still don’t really want scalpers using the website. It’s more the buyers that we look into. So if we’re looking at people that are buying a hell of a lot of tickets, we’ll send them an email and just say, we’ve noticed that you’re buying a lot of tickets, just so you know, this is like a first warning, kind of thing. And we do that based on the information that’s given to us when they are transacting essentially.

So we track it manually, we’re very vigilant, we keep an eye on it, and we do keep a list of those people that we are noticing that are buying too much or selling too much… There’s a lot of information in there that we can obtain so we can start banning people if we need to and we can blacklist them from our website and they won’t be able to use it anymore.

And in terms of safety of those transactions, what happens if you’re doing a digital transfer of a ticket – do you hold both the payment and the ticket until both are cleared?

The way that it works is, the seller needs to have PayPal to be able to sell. Now the buyer can actually buy with a credit card, or debit card, or use PayPal, that’s up to them. So when an e-ticket comes in for instance, we hold it on our system. It will get delivered to the actual buyer but the money won’t clear to the seller until after the event, much like on every other secondary ticketing website. So if there are any issues with that, their money is still protected and we can get that buyer a refund as well.

And so if something happens like the ticket turns out to have been duplicated or something like that and they don’t get into the event, then it’s automatically going to be a refund for them?

Essentially, yes. So the buyer would obviously get in touch with us. We ask them to speak to the venue at the box office, just to let us know that they’ve been turned away and then we kind of say, right this has happened, they’ve not been let into the event, they’re entitled to a refund, basically.

“[L]ooking at it from the outside … it’s like the Wild West [in secondary ticketing], you know? People are charging whatever they want.”

And what happens with names on tickets and that kind of thing? If somebody wanted to sell their Harry Styles ticket on Twickets, how would that work?

We’re fairly flexible with a lot of the things that we can do. So if we know that there is a certain security measure in place, we can adapt to that – if we know that for instance every name has to be on tickets, we may well speak to the promoter or speak to the artist and just say, ’Is there any chance you want us to work on this? If so, can you let us know all the details’ so we can put in certain provisions.

What we will say if someone is going to sell a ticket, they’ll actually only be able to sell one ticket because they’re going to need to go into the venue with the person.

So there are certain provisions we can put in place. We make sure that we can offer everything that a primary agent can with as much safety as we can as well.

And you make your money from charging a fee on top of that transaction?

On top of the ticket fee, yeah. So there’s a 10% charge to buyers and that’s it, nothing to sellers at all.

I suppose that really adds up if you’ve got quite a valuable ticket?

Yeah, I mean it can add up. And I think it’s one of those things where, yes it can add up but when you look at your Viagogos and your Ticketmaster resale, generally you’re looking at a markup of at least 30 to 40% on the face value of the ticket alone. That’s not including the booking fees Ticketmaster are charging to the seller, or the buyer. I don’t mean to use Ticketmaster as the sole example, but you can look at between 30 and 40% on booking fees on top of an extortionate ticket price as well.

And so you have calculated that you think that’s fair?

Yeah. We still sit probably around 30 to 35% lower across all fees, you know, just on fees alone, not even on the face value of the ticket, so I think we’re a much more reasonable price in that the ticket is at face value and people don’t mind paying for an extra admin fee to get a ticket at face value.

Do you think that the Ticketmaster resale facilities and places like Viagogo have abrogated their responsibility to try and mitigate scalping?

[L]ooking at it from the outside … it’s like the Wild West [in secondary ticketing], you know? People are charging whatever they want. There’s nothing to stop them doing it. I remember seeing when Viagogo were in the House of Commons discussing – oh sorry no, it wasn’t Viagogo, it was StubHub – they essentially sent a lawyer in to talk about it and the only response he had was, “We don’t need to police our website. Legally we don’t need to police it.” So people can do what they want essentially.

So they take no responsibility for what people are doing on those websites. I know a lot of people at Live Nation and I’ve got a lot of respect for all of them and I know most of them aren’t … they don’t like scalping from what I know. Ticketmaster Resale [have] been getting a lot of stick recently I think because obviously they are a primary agent as well and they’re not looking at their site properly from what I can see, and I think that they need to be a little bit more responsible for what they are doing.

Which is double-dipping.

Absolutely, yeah, and I mean, it’s one of those things, you can kind of look at it in two different ways, in that the secondary ticketing industry is now worth, I think last time I saw it, was around $8 billion worldwide. And I’m sure Ticketmaster probably deliberated it and Live Nation deliberated it for a long time. It probably ended up being an ’if you can’t beat them, join them’ situation. I obviously don’t know, but it is double-dipping and I don’t like to think that Ticketmaster or Live Nation are putting their own tickets on Ticketmaster resale, I’m pretty sure it’s just scalpers doing it, but we can’t know.

I’ve got a philosophical question for you. So I’m a high school student, I’ve managed to get an Ed Sheeran ticket in the presale with my Maccas wages, and now I can’t go because it’s my sister’s wedding that night. Now obviously, she’s dead to me, but either way I’ve got to sell my ticket. Is there something inherently wrong with me wanting to make an extra 50 bucks to soothe my anguish, like on top of that?

In terms of being fair to other fans that want to go, I don’t see that many other fans are going to want to do it. I wouldn’t do it personally, I can understand why people might want to do it, but I think personally, no, it shouldn’t really be done. If they’d paid for a hotel or something, they’re not going to get those [costs] back most of the time, I can understand why someone would want to do it, but I would always say to me, that’s my choice, I’ve made the issue here, I will bear the brunt of the cost for all of those things. So I think it should always be face value as far as I’m concerned.

If they’d paid for a hotel or something, they’re not going to get those [costs] back most of the time, I can understand why someone would want to do it, but I would always say to me, that’s my choice, I’ve made the issue here, I will bear the brunt of the cost for all of those things. So I think it should always be face value as far as I’m concerned.

So it’s not necessarily wrong – it’s just kind of a jerk move?

Yeah, I mean it is wrong. I can see why people do it, essentially. I can understand why the temptation is there to upsell your ticket a little bit. … I don’t think it’s right to sell above face value, I’ve never done it and I never would, but I can see why people do it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.