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Lyte founder resigns amid reported shutdown

The founder and CEO of ticketing exchange firm Lyte has resigned amid uncertainty about the future of the company.

The US-based firm suddenly went dark last week, with a message on its website reading “Our website is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. We should be back shortly”.

Now, the firm’s leader Ant Taylor has confirmed his resignation from the company after 10 years of operation.

He told Billboard that an “emergency board/creditors effort [is] underway” to find a potential buyer to repay punters and promoters affected by Lyte’s sudden shutdown.

According to the publication, staff have been laid off, and potentially numerous concert promoters have been left “unpaid” for “hundreds of thousands of dollars” worth of tickets.

High-profile clients for Lyte included Baja Beach festival, the Lost Lands festival in Ohio, Pitchfork Music Festival and Newport Folk Festival, although it’s unclear which events are owed money by Lyte.

Lyte acquired the assets of Festicket in 2022 after the latter firm collapsed with debts of more than £22.5m

As recently as the beginning of last week, Lyte was promoting its Lyte Groups solution and at the beginning of September, it announced a partnership with Revolt World Festival in Atlanta.

Taylor launched Lyte in 2014, raising around $53 million in four major funding rounds, with his biggest investors believed to be Chamath Palihapitiya from Silicon Valley VC Social Capital and New York hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman.

Lyte bills itself as a fan-to-fan ticket exchange where fans could list tickets to events they couldn’t attend and ethically resell those tickets to other fans wanting to attend a concert.

In 2022, the company acquired Festicket and Event Genius assets signalling “significant and immediate growth for Lyte”. London-headquartered Festicket, which acquired Event Genius and the associated Ticket Arena consumer website and brand in 2019, formally entered administration earlier that year and owed more than £22.5 million at the time of its collapse.

Festicket and Event Genius worked with hundreds of festivals and events across the UK, EU, Australia and Latin America, including BPM Festival, Ibiza Rocks, Summer Daze and Annie Mac’s Lost & Found Festival.

At the time, Lyte pledged to “find ways to reconcile and rebuild with affected promoter clients”, but the Ticketing Business reports the firm became saddled with Festicket’s debts and made a “series of missteps” in attempting to placate creditors.

 


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Lyte raises $15m for ‘post-primary ticketing’

Ticket exchange Lyte has raised US$15 million in a series-A funding round to further its mission of creating a “new category in live events: post-primary ticketing”, the company has announced.

US-based Lyte is a fan-to-fan ticket market that connects those no longer able to attend a sold-out event with those who wish to. Buyers can purchase tickets at a much lower price than those offered the secondary market, because Lyte uses dynamic pricing to keep prices below those offered by “third-party scalpers and shady marketplaces”.

Lyte’s ticketing partners include Eventbrite/Ticketfly, AEG’s Elevate Tickets, Live Nation’s Front Gate Tickets and Universe, and Patron Technology’s ShowClix, which it claims to empower to “own the secondary market” by capturing around 60% of the value that would otherwise be lost to third-party resellers.

The company additionally estimates it has saved fans $5.5m since launching in 2013.

Commenting on the new investment, which comes courtesy of Industry Ventures, Accomplice Ventures and Correlation Ventures, among others, Lyte CEO Ant Taylor says: “We made a foundational bet we could build a platform and marketplace that included and benefited all of the folks with financial and emotional investment in this industry: rightsholders, talent, enterprise ticketing companies, as well as fans.

“This raise is a validation of that bet. It’s a win for our partners and the future of the live events ecosystem.”

Other investors include Bernie Cahill and Greg Suess of Activist Artist Management, Chris Martin, the former CTO of Pandora, and internet entrepreneur Matt Mickiewicz, the co-founder of start-ups including 99designs, Hired and Flippa.

“Lyte puts control, revenue and insights into the hands of event producers”

Its ‘post-primary ticketing’ offer, according to Lyte, comprises “private label ticketing services offered to fans by the most iconic sports and entertainment brands, including Coachella, Mumford & Sons, Comic Cons in New York City and Seattle and scores more”.

Lyte’s clients include 50 festivals, 300 venues and several touring artists. The company is now focusing on non-US growth, as well as expansion into other areas of entertainment and sports.

“When our clients choose Lyte, they are choosing a platform that addresses the customer needs ignored by the traditional secondary market, and it does so in a way that is fair to fans, controlled by rights holders and which harnesses the best in yield management and marketplace science,” says Lawrence Peryer, Lyte’s head of business and corporate development. “Lyte puts control, revenue and insights into the hands of event producers, while providing a simple, safe and affordable fan experience.

“Combined with this funding round, the consortium of entities involved, our name-brand clients and legions of happy fans, Lyte’s platform is changing the face of ticketing while closing the door on the incumbent secondary players.”

“This important company milestone is just the beginning, and our clients and partners know it,” concludes Taylor. “We are creating a category that will challenge and overtake the incumbent secondary ticketing model. That is super-exciting.”

 


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Ticket bots: Hidden menace or red herring?

While ticket bots – automated software used to hoover up concert tickets to then resell – remain legal in most of the world, the last 12 months have seen official sentiment in several major markets shift towards prohibition.

The state of New York was the first to criminalise the usage of bots, with legislation introduced by Carl Heastie and Marcos Crespo providing for up to a year in prison for offenders. The Canadian province of Ontario followed suit in September, and the US as a whole outlawed bots in December with then-president Barack Obama’s signing of the Better Online Ticket Sales – or Bots – Act into law.

The UK, meanwhile, is set to soon introduce its own ban, while Adelaide senator Nick Xenophon is pushing for anti-bot legislation in Australia.

The vast majority of those working in the live music industry agree on the need for a ban on bots – including, tellingly, secondary ticketing giants StubHub and Ticketmaster (Seatwave, Ticketmaster Resale, TicketExchange, Get Me In!) – but there are concerns among some anti-touting activists that a singular focus on bots could detract from the conversation around what they see as a fundamentally broken ticketing market.

Speaking to the UK parliament committee on ‘ticket abuse’ earlier this month, Rob Wilmshurst, CEO of Vivendi Ticketing/See Tickets – which recently launched its own face-value ticket exchange, Fan2Fan – said he believes bots have been a “red herring” in the debate over secondary ticketing in the UK. “We’ve added more technology to thwart them [bots], but we don’t see conversion rates dropping,” he told MPs.

Similarly, Adam Webb, of anti-secondary campaign group FanFair Alliance, responded to the US’s bot ban with a note of caution, highlighting that the legislation was “supported by companies who run secondary ticketing services, and who benefit directly from mass-scale ticket touting”.

Are ticket bots, then, a straw man on which the big secondaries are happily pinning the blame for headline-grabbing $3,000 Adele tickets, or could a global ban on bots actually be effective in eliminating price-gouging in the secondary market?

“Bots aren’t the only way tickets end up on the secondary market”

Reg Walker, of events security firm Iridium, says any legal initiatives aimed at combatting bots “can only be a good thing”. He concedes that while there are “systemic problems in the ticket industry as a whole”, including ticket agencies with a “foot in both camps” (primary and secondary), “any legislation that goes any way towards levelling the playing field must be welcomed”.

Walker cautions, however, that “legislation is only as good as the amount of enforcement that goes into supporting it”. A major problem with the law in the UK, he tells IQ, is that the onus is on secondary sites themselves to report attempts to buy tickets using bots: “Is there any incentive to report bot attacks when the same company may well end up, by intention or inadvertently, being a net beneficiary of that activity?” he asks.

The chief executive of the UK’s Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR), Jonathan Brown, agrees on the importance of ticketing sites reporting all bot attacks. “Bots are certainly one way that touts get hold of tickets, and it’s great that there is action specifically on this issue,” he explains. “However, we have always said that this also needs to go alongside far greater understanding and technical defences against such attacks – and, of course, a need for attacks or suspected attacks to be reported.”

Legislation targeting bots is a “great first step”, says Ant Taylor, the founder and CEO of Lyte, which powers the new ‘fan-to-fan’ ticket exchange from Ticketfly, a supporter of the bot ban in the US. “The public has experienced longstanding frustration from not having access to tickets for their favourite artists, or having to pay exorbitant prices to do so.”

Taylor highlights the importance of fans genuinely unable to attend a show having a “viable technological alternative”, such as Ticketfly/Lyte, to resell their ticket. “We’ve integrated Lyte directly with a primary ticketing company,” he continues, “so their venue and promoter partners now have complete control of the fan experience. This keeps the money in the hands of those who contribute to these incredible live event experiences and away from scalpers who purely profit off them.”

Patrick Kirby, managing director of recently launched white-label platform Tixserve, cautions that overemphasis on bots could lead to a spike in “low-tech” crime such as counterfeiting. “An unintended consequence of the ban on bots might be an increase in the fraudulent duplication or counterfeiting of tickets, which is a low-tech activity when tickets continue to be paper-based,” he tells IQ.

“Professional touts already use other, non-bot, methods of acquiring primary tickets for the secondary market”

Kirby says the effectiveness of banning bots will depend largely on the “extent to which bot operators will seek to circumvent the new legislation. The previous experience of the Tixserve team in the card payments and mobile-airtime distribution sectors is that the targets of anti-abuse measures always look to find creative ways of protecting their lucrative, ill-gotten incomes. Sometimes, it can be akin to pinning down a lump of jelly.”

Walker believes, however, that it’s extremely easy to tell when a site has fallen victim to a bot attack.

“We live in a technological age, and there is an overdependence on computer programs and algorithms to detect this activity,” he comments. Bot attacks are “so easy to spot on primary ledgers”, says Walker – providing ticket agencies actually take the time to look. “We haven’t found a single case, bar one, where a primary or secondary ticket agent has gone to police or Trading Standards and asked them to investigate,” he explains.

“Bottom line: it [banning bots] is not a silver bullet,” comments Adam Webb, who as FanFair campaign manager welcomed plans by the British government to ban bots as part of its implementation of the Waterson report.

“Moves by government[s to] criminalise the misuse of technology to bulk-buy tickets are an important and welcome step,” Webb tells IQ. “However […] not every tout has this sort of software in their armoury. There are many alternative ways to access large volumes of inventory…

“That’s why FanFair, in our response, was keen to give equal weight to the other elements of government’s announcement, particularly the blanket acceptance of Professor Waterson’s recommendations and suggestion of further actions to improve transparency in this market. (Waterson’s recommendations largely centre on proper reinforcement of the 2015 Consumer Rights Act, which obliges resellers to list the original face value, seat/row numbers and any ticket restrictions.)

“Bottom line: It is not a silver bullet”

Kirby adds that banning bots ignores “professional touts [who] already use other non-bot methods of acquiring primary tickets for placement on the secondary market”. In response to bot bans, resellers could, says Kirby, “ramp up the practice of using teams of people masquerading as genuine fans to buy significant amounts of tickets using multiple identities, addresses and credit cards”.

Stuart Cain, managing director of NEC Group’s The Ticket Factory, agrees with Walker that “banning bots is just one part of a much wider story”, but says any legislation “that allows for greater transparency in the market and help to stop fans being conned is a positive”. “There’s still a way to go, but [banning bots] is a promising first step when it comes to the industry finally cleaning up its act,” he comments.

While Walker praises the recent raft of anti-bot measures as “fantastic” – and the recent British legislation, in particular, as having real “teeth” – he warns against the tendency to think of banning ticket bots as a panacaea to sky-high prices on the secondary market.

“The danger is that while we have all this focus on bots and software, the other structural issues in ticketing could be ignored,” he concludes. “Bots aren’t the only way tickets end up on the secondary market.”

 


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