Welcome back to closing bell on cheddar news everyone and
live music is back after being completely upended by this
pandemic. The music industry is seeing surges in ticket
sales for live shows? For example, live music
discovery platform bands in town says it's seen an increase
of eight million users in just the last six months
. And joining us now is resurgent bands and towns
co founder and managing partner. Thank you so much
for joining us. Congrats on this resurgence. What
other trends is your company seeing uh in terms of
show demand for live music and how it's been growing
during this time, Isaiah. Yes, thanks for
having us. It's it's a pleasure. It's it's
very good and important time for artists and fans because
if one thing that has been proven is that the
pandemic staff, the fans and really preventing them from
experiencing this tribal experience. You know, the moment
where you really experience something as a communal moment,
cheering for the same artist for the music and the
altogether um sharing one experience. So the starvation now
created, pent up demand, an unprecedented level of
pent up demand from the fans as as well as
an unprecedented level of offer with twice as many artists
on tour as it used to be pre pandemic.
And on the demand side, We now see ticketing
companies selling as many tickets within six months as they
as they used to sell within one year, wow
within six months, that's what they did in one
year. And it makes sense. I think we
all kind of forgot just how incredible of an experience
these live music shows are, What other data does
your company have around recent trends when it comes to
live music? Is there a specific genre or a
type of live show or concert that is seeing the
most demand right now? Yes, actually. Um
, so everything that relates to latin music is really
hot and you can see that trending at festivals,
the programming of festival vastly increased the number of artists
playing. Such music work shows pretty strong in in
fact vibrant activity with new acts and a lot of
emerging artists trying to compete in this in this area
. And obviously the the the usual suspects big tours
of pop stars going on. We also see that
geographically behaviors are very different. Clearly americans feel really
confident and much more confident about the future because they
rush to buy tickets Right now. And while you
know, and while in Europe you can see that
there are 30% more shows listed on the platform.
We currently offer 375,000 shows, upcoming shows to the
fans everywhere in the world, still in europe,
fans are way more reluctant to buy tickets much earlier
ahead of the show. So it was very,
and that's a change of behavior because prior to the
pandemic fans were buying tickets really last minute. It
was like a big trends going on now. Post
pandemic fans now realized that they have to buy tickets
really ahead of time. It struck me that today
we learned that Coachella announced its 2023 dates and starts
selling tickets right now. Um Like it's almost a
year ahead of the of the events. Um That's
that's that's an unprecedented. That's incredible. Yeah,
really interesting. And Live Nation also recently reported an
uptick in concert ticket sales. Can you speak on
what the company's recent earnings report reveals about the shift
in consumer behavior there around ticket buying and worth noting
they're not cheap. They're very expensive to make up
for this recovery from the pandemic look all players in
this ecosystem also face huge challenges, venues and promoters
, the crews are way more expensive than they used
to be. Clearly, it's way more difficult to
find people. Some simply left industry During the pandemic
. You know, it sounds like it was like
10 years ago, but you know, a few
months ago, there was no shows at all.
So a lot of people left and didn't want to
come back then the cost of production, electricity and
everything that is an important part of the cost of
an event also exploited as you know, as they
do for all consumers. So this is definitely driving
um, to get the price up on top of
obviously this uh ratio and this this high demand that
comes from the fence. I'm glad that you mentioned
the cruise because I would definitely pay more if I
knew it was going to trickle down to everyone who's
a part of this ecosystem. But I also want
to shift topics a bit and talk about N.
F. T. S. And their potential impact
on live music. How could a digital ticket in
the form of an N. F. T.
Really continue to be a game changer for live events
? Well, that's that's pretty um self explicit in
your way. And N. F. T.
Is a gateway, is like a key to provide
utility, right? And the ticket is in the
real life, pretty much what it is, it
provides you access to an experience. But the experience
is multifaceted usually was, you know, shows and
consumption of alcohol and things like that. That's the
same. I think the N. F. T
. Will be very helpful to build the experience before
during and after the show while the ticket is essentially
during the show. And so for example, we
launched an emerging artist program called Big Break and we
did, we wanted each artist to play live stream
. And if you attend the live stream, we
enable the fans to claim an N. F.
T. That proved the attendance. This N.
F. T. Is a way to connect the
fans with these emerging artists. And should the emerging
artists become famous and or at least successful, they
will be always supported and followed by these fans,
which creates a new form of fandom. Yeah,
I absolutely think in the N. F. T
. Space it's very saturated. But this is one
of the applications that has a very promising future that
if, I mean I don't think the N.
F. T. Space is saturated. What is
saturated is the perception that the N. F.
T. Would be limited to a certain type of
use case. Um There are so many use case
to invent, there are so many use cases that
we don't even think of right now that you will
see that what is perceived as being saturated today because
there's been too, probably too too many and too
quickly. Um too many initiatives in this space.
You will see that this is going to diversify and
and flourish actually beyond the current challenges that the industry
is facing. I really appreciate that perspective fabrice Sergent
, co founder and managing partner for bands in town
. Thank you again for joining us.