How NFT Ticketing Could Disrupt a $30bn Industry

Today’s sale of concert tickets goes through a very antiquated system that has been creating a lot of problems in a number of industries such as entertainment and sports. Non-Fungible tokens are promising to revolutionize this market by eliminating touting and counterfeiting.

According to statements by Ryan Kenny, CEO of SeatlabNFT, 12% of buyers would have had to deal with fake tickets at least once in their life. And the problem seems to represent the tip of a much deeper iceberg since the current market for access to entertainment is run by a very few companies sharing a business worth billions of dollars.

A billionaire business that could make networks that support NFT far more in demand than they are today. The NFT universe is increasingly finding concrete applications in real life. From gaming to sports and even implementations by air transport giants such as Emirates, (which we have already talked about last week) the events business certainly has an interest in embracing such innovation.

SeatlabNFT is a marketplace for tickets for events based exclusively on blockchain and is one of the players in the industry ready to leverage the developments in this direction.

Touting is consolidated and transversal practice: in every country and for any major event, there is never a lack of those who stock up on tickets to then resell them at inflated prices—either online or directly outside the gates.

It has to be observed of course that the above-mentioned scenario is also a way to allow those who have not found the ticket in the official channels to attend the event anyway. In this perspective, apart from the speculative aspect, there would be nothing wrong.

The thing that is quite concerning is the total indifference of the entertainment oligarchs in regard to this and other speculative phenomena in their industry. The ticket industry sees volumes of around 30 billion dollars per year and is in the hands of a few companies that thus enjoy a very dominant position in such a profitable market.

And such companies often show indifference to scalping phenomena, and little—if any—interest in protecting the interests of defrauded buyers.

Migrating to an NFT-based system could solve the problem of scalpers, which inevitably affects the spectators and consumers.

But there’s more to that. The personal digital ticket on a Non-Fungible Token would also open up the opportunity to link a series of side experiences to the main one, as has been happening for some time now in other sectors of the wider entertainment business. For example, a very pragmatic use case was introduced during ETHDenver in 2019: the so-called Proof of Attendance Protocol – or “POAP” for short. This is a unique NFT given to people to prove they attended an event (either virtual or physical). Such an ecosystem to preserve memories allows people to accrue a collection of POAPs to document their physical life experiences and activity through cyberspace.

It is likely that the live event industry will be affected by disruption when it comes to NFTs. There are a lot of opportunities and new technologies in this industry for ticketing companies and concert promoters to use to make live events a lot better.  Tickets are being affected by the emerging technology trend of NFTs, which is disrupting almost every industry. NFT for ticketing ensures that secondary buyers are buying valid tickets to an event, thereby bringing transparency to the ticketing platform.