Creditors owed £22.5m after Festicket collapse
Festicket owed more than £22.5 million to creditors at the time of its collapse, according to new documents.
The London-headquartered festival discovery and booking platform, which acquired Event Genius and Ticket Arena in 2019, entered administration last month after attempts to rescue the company as a going concern failed.
A new Companies House filing shows a total of £22,560,175 in unsecured debts. Significant creditors each owed seven-figure sums are listed as Event Horizon (£2,290,244), AEG Presents (£1,506,352) and Slammin Events (£1,346,679) in the UK, Spain’s Mad Cool (£1,516,613), and Australia’s Festco (£2,359,827) and Lost Paradise (£1,580,292).
In addition, more than 20 firms were owed six-figure sums including Amnesia (£918,309), Primavera Sound (£314,168) and Andalucia Big Festival (£184,574) in Spain; Australia’s Grapevine Gathering (£703,113) and The Hour Group (£104,704); Portugal’s Everything is New (£223,807), MOYG (£180,775) and Conquistapadrao (£141,571); Cosmopop (£284,341) and Loft (£211,256) in Germany; and US-based Float Fest (£361,492) and Danny Wimmer Presents (£111,329).
Others creditors include the UK’s NCLF (£221,991), Motion & The Marble Factory (£201,683), Hospitality D&B Events (£415,801) and 2 Four Six Marketing (£112,050); Croatia’s Electronic Events (£328,337); GMED Projects, Malta (£143,659) and Malta Tourism Authority (£115,191); Loveland Events (£247,122) in the Netherlands; Movement Entertainment (£182,166) and SAND (£164,416) in Italy. HMRC, owed £298,000, is named as a preferential creditor.
The firm’s credit card processor, Stripe, has advised that it holds £7.69m across multiple currencies but “the level of any recoveries in relation to this sum are currently uncertain and will depend on a number of factors”.
In a statement outlining its proposals, administrator ReSolve Advisory adds: “We have received communication from a number of promoter creditors who are asserting that the net realisations from their ticket sales were to be held in trust for them by the company. Our understanding is that the company did not segregate or ringfence any assets for the benefit of specific parties.”
“We considered that a pre-packaged administration sale of the business and certain assets of the company as a going concern would result in the best outcome for the company’s creditors”
Ticketing exchange Lyte announced earlier this month that it had acquired Festicket and Event Genius assets and pledged to protect Festicket employees and find “ways to reconcile and rebuild with affected promoter clients”. Lyte’s clients include North American festivals such as Life Is Beautiful, Pitchfork Music Festival, BottleRock and Baja Beach Fest.
ReSolve’s Cameron Gunn, Simon Jagger and Lee Manning, who are overseeing Festicket’s administration, pursued a “pre-pack” sale – whereby a firm’s business and assets are immediately sold by administrator under a sale arranged before the administrator was appointed.
“We considered that a pre-packaged administration sale of the business and certain assets of the company as a going concern would result in the best outcome for the company’s creditors,” says Manning in the report.
After marketing Festicket to “a range of industry specific parties”, a deal was struck with Lyte, which acquired the company’s business and certain assets for £100,000.
“We understand it is the purchaser’s intention to carry on the business of the company,” adds Manning. “We expect that this will reduce the risk of future event cancellations in relation to events for which tickets have been sold, and therefore improve the overall outcome for creditors.”
“The company’s systems were challenged by the new requirements created by the pandemic”
Founded in 2012 by Zack Sabban, Jerome Elfassy and Jonathan Youne, Festicket also ran offices in the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, France and Australia. The company recorded losses of approximately £11.3 million and £8m in the 2019 and 2020 financial years, respectively.
“Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and the resulting lockdowns, social distancing and restrictions on travel, the company experienced an unprecedented level of ticketing refunds and deferment requests due to the multiple event cancellations and a reduction in consumer confidence,” states the document.
“The company’s systems were challenged by the new requirements created by the pandemic. This was further exacerbated by the integration of the Event Genius and Ticket Arena platforms, which had not yet been completed. As a result, the company’s financial and internal reporting systems became increasingly reliant on manual calculation and input.”
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Lyte acquires Festicket and Event Genius assets
Ticketing exchange and technology firm Lyte has confirmed the acquisition of Festicket and Event Genius assets.
The firm says the acquisition represents “significant and immediate growth for Lyte, with a broad expansion of their services and team worldwide”.
London-headquartered Festicket, which acquired Event Genius and the associated Ticket Arena consumer website and brand in 2019, formally entered administration last week, with ReSolve Advisory Limited appointed to oversee the process.
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.
The company has pledged to protect Festicket employees and find “ways to reconcile and rebuild with affected promoter clients”.
The news comes after Australian festival Borderline Music and Arts Festival (cap. 10,000) was cancelled due to the collapse of Festicket, which was its primary ticketing partner.
According to the company, many Festicket clients have begun signing with Lyte, including Slammin Events in the UK and Vic Falls Carnival in Zimbabwe. More signings across the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia are to be confirmed in the coming days.
“To be launching Lyte’s international expansion from the place where it all started, is truly special”
“Lyte’s success to date has been achieved by building a coalition of employees, ticketing companies, and event organisers who share the aspiration to make all aspects of going to a show as great as seeing the talent that graces the stage,” says Lawrence Peryer, Lyte’s chief commercial officer.
“With the assets we have acquired in this transaction – and all of the new team members in the UK, Europe and Australia who we welcome as part of it – we are bringing global opportunities to our existing employees and partners while extending an offer of access to our alternate universe to all promoters, ticket platforms and fans worldwide. The future of live events is here.”
Ant Taylor, Lyte’s CEO and founder, adds: “Ten years ago I visited London for the 2012 Olympic games. The events were sold out, there were no tickets on the streets but the venues were half-full. I was just a fan but that empty seats problem stuck with me and led me to start Lyte a couple years later. To be launching Lyte’s international expansion from the place where it all started, is truly special. Our company vision is to make the live events e-commerce experience magical for fans and event creators, the world over…This is a step in that direction. Now the real work begins.”
Lyte enables fans to reserve tickets without competing with other fans and brokers during on-sales, to return tickets if their plans change and to easily secure tickets to sold-out events.
The company says the results are fuller venues for talent and event stakeholders and a significant reduction in risk for fans of overpaying or being stuck with unusable tickets.
Lyte’s clients include North American festivals such as Life Is Beautiful, Pitchfork Music Festival, BottleRock and Baja Beach Fest.
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Report: Lyte to acquire Event Genius assets
Ticketing exchange and technology firm Lyte is reportedly acquiring certain assets from Festicket-owned Event Genius.
Earlier this week, it emerged that Festicket was on the verge of falling into administration after a moratorium filed by the festival discovery and booking platform came to an end, with Companies House documents stating it was “no longer likely to result in the rescue of the company as a going concern”.
Now, according to an update to partners seen by The Ticketing Business, Event Genius – the ticketing and cashless payments specialist acquired by Festicket in 2019 – confirms it is winding down its existing business and has reached a deal with US-based Lyte.
“An agreement has been made with Lyte for the sale of certain assets from the business, including the technology platforms and employee contracts”
“We can now tell you that an agreement has been made with Lyte for the sale of certain assets from the business, including the technology platforms and employee contracts,” it says. “We are on a path to close this transaction on Monday 12 September.
“In parallel, we are in a process to wind down the existing business, which includes the appointment of an Administrator to determine what monies will be on-hand to pay out unsecured creditors and promoter obligations. You will be hearing more on that process from us soon.”
Event Genius worked with well known European events, including BPM Festival, Ibiza Rocks, Summer Daze and Annie Mac’s Lost & Found Festival.
“Going forward, Lyte will take over the operation and continue providing our end-to-end event management technology – while also offering their platform – to all of our partners,” adds the update. “In addition, Lyte is preparing a proposal for new agreements with them which include plans to address what, if any, money you are owed by us.”
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Ticketing co Lyte raises $33m in series-B round
San Francisco-based ticketing technology platform Lyte has raised US$33 million in a series-B funding round, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $48m.
Lyte, founded in 2013, says that the funding will allow it to continue its growth beyond the nearly 300 artist tours, festivals, venues and live events that use the firm’s technology. It raised $15m last October.
The ticketing technology enables fans to reserve, return and exchange tickets through its proprietary risk-free reservations system, which has been utilised by Coachella, as well as major tours with the likes of Mumford & Sons and Wilco.
Through its proprietary Always OnSale ticket reservation technology, fans can reserve tickets far in advance of an event’s traditional on-sale date and even before all of the event details are known – enabling artists and events to go to market and aggregate demand.
Joining as first-time Lyte investors are Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, music icon Quincy Jones and Rocketship VC.
“Our rapid and continued growth – despite the hardships that have hit the live events sector in 2020 – serves as a testament”
In addition, returning to the fund is Jackson Square Ventures, Accomplice, Correlation Ventures, Philip Deutch, Zander Lurie and digital media entrepreneur and Lyte board member, Rob Goldberg.
“We believe buying tickets should be no different from any other consumer purchase: fans should be able to support their favourite artists, venues and events without the worry of what to do with their tickets if their life plans change, nor should they be driven to the unregulated secondary market and learn to become amateur ticket scalpers just because they need their money back,” says Ant Taylor, Lyte founder and CEO.
“We have made consumer choice and flexibility in event ticketing a reality through an investment in technology and partnerships with all of the stakeholders in the events we work with: talent and their representatives, promoters, and venues,” continued Taylor.
“This approach allows us to build products that offer new ways for fans to safely and easily buy more tickets. Our rapid and continued growth – despite the hardships that have hit other parts of the live events sector in 2020 – serves as a testament to the ways our platform and philosophy are bringing better consumer experiences and business outcomes to all we deal with, and we anticipate bringing those benefits to millions of event-goers worldwide by the end of 2021.”
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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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