Born of frustration: Twickets takes on the ticket touts

What do you consider to be an ethical business? An organisation that has been the subject of debate between Pioneers Post staffers this week has been Twickets. 

Trying to get tickets to see your favourite artist only to see the gig sell out in seconds is bad enough. The salt in the wound is when you see tickets advertised on other websites at prices that make your eyes water. 

Twickets is an online platform that enables fans to sell their spare gig or event tickets, but only if they’re offered for face value or less. At Pioneers Post, we also concluded that it could be a social innovation.

And it's an idea that seems to be popular – Twickets has just exceeded its target of £700,000 by 37% on equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs. It aims to use the investment to undertake its first ever marketing campaign and expand internationally.

There’s a whole industry that’s developed around the immoral and, in some ways illicit, trading of these tickets. That’s what we are fighting against

The idea was born out of frustration. Twickets CEO Richard Davies hadn’t been able to get tickets to see Lykke Li when they went on sale, but later found someone giving some away on Twitter. 

He wondered if other people might be doing the same and finding that they were, set up the @Twickets account to flag up fans looking to pass their tickets on to other fans. The Twitter handle proved popular, was followed by an app and the idea became a fully fledged business.

Although “disrupt” is an overused word in both the social enterprise and social innovation worlds, Davies was looking to do this to the secondary ticketing market.

“The secondary ticketing market was frustrating me and had done since I worked in the music industry.” He adds that it has been exacerbated in recent years by the entrance of several new players.

Davies sees a conspiracy in the many tickets that find their way on to secondary tickets sites so soon after they go on sale. As he says, it would be virtually impossible for individuals to advertise them in such volume so quickly.

“There’s a whole industry that’s developed around the immoral and, in some ways illicit, trading of these tickets. That’s what we are fighting against and it's what those who invest in us are fighting against as well,” Davies says.

Investors through the crowdfunding campaign include One Direction manager Harry Magee and Steve Parish, chairman of Crystal Palace football club.

Davies believes that investors are supporting Twickets for ethical reasons but also because, ultimately, it will be good for the music industry.

“They’re doing this for moral reasons but they’re also doing it because it’s destroying the industry as well. If a fan is ripped off and paying three, four or five times face value for an event, the likelihood is that they are not going to go to as many events in the future. 

“They’re not going to buy as much merchandise when they go to the show, as they can’t afford to, and they’re not going to spend as much money at the bar either. 

“So everybody is losing out and, unless something is done to address that, soon it will damage investment in entertainment over the course of time. People will put on fewer shows and take fewer risks because they are not seeing the same returns.”

Davies is not the only one to think there might be something amiss about the secondary ticketing market. The UK government's competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority, has just launched an investigation that will look into “any connection the seller has with the event organisers”, among other things.

Competitions and Markets Authority acting chief executive Andrea Coscelli commented: “We have heard concerns about a lack of transparency over who is buying up tickets from the primary market.”

Not only do fans like the idea of Twickets, it seems that artists do too. Adele, the biggest selling artist in the world for the last two years, recently announced that Twickets will be the official resale site for her gigs in the summer. 

A notice on the Twickets website says: “resale of tickets through any channel other than Twickets will not be accepted; you risk having them cancelled and being denied entry to the show”.

If someone with the influence of Adele wants fans to be able to buy her tickets at the price they were advertised, could this be the final nail in the coffin for ticket touts?

• Read more about Richard Davies and Twickets in the forthcoming issue of Pioneers Post Quarterly – out early 2017. And if you're not a subscriber yet, find out more here.

Photo credit: Southbank Centre