Hacker News Reader

Comment by manholio | Hacker News Reader

All kind of models are possible: associate your social ID and prove you've distributed band related content early in their career; associate multiple past purchases - for things like merchandising, fan specials, behind the scenes etc. etc.

The main theme is giving band and labels tools to maintain and curate this relationship with the fanbase, and only then add ticketing on top of it. If you have a certain mass and sign multiple names from the same genre, you can leverage that data to "migrate" say Green Day fans to some new alternative/punk band and offer them discounts, under the assumption this could build strong preferences for that band in the future.

Instead of maximizing present ticket revenue and "burning" a band's current fanbase, you maximize career-wide earnings, fan number and impact. That's a kind of moat that's unbeatable.

View on HN

I love the idea of requiring the purchase of merchandise beforehand, although I'm not sure if this would only compound the problem of scalping. The problem with building moats is

a ) scalpers will write algorithms to predict where the moats are before fans can get there

b ) it discourages new fans getting into a band

Doesn't this discriminate against fans that would not like to share their personal info. or who don't condone to this kind of tracking?

Everything in the world discriminates against some class of people. Taylor Swift is optimizing for "verified fans" - i.e., people who will actively share how big of fans they are. It's just good business, because she's developing a lifetime customer base. Someone will need to attend the "final tours" she gives when she's 60, 70, 80. Also, Taylor Swift fandom is one of the most mainstream fandoms I can think of - there's little risk of a severe reputational risk for admitting it.

I don't see how it's any better than discriminating against poor fans though via selling the tickets at market price.

It's better for the fans since they get more content with less money, with the tradeoff of some personal information.

Since the band and ticketing partner are not in the ad business and want to build long term, I expect that limited personal info to be much less likely abused than what the typical social network site does with even more sensitive data (yet, most people seem to agree trading those off to for free news of the Kardashians in their feed, so what do I know).

At the limit, any kind of price discrimination needs some type of information to execute, you can't subsidize completely anonymous fans because market forces will quickly close that loop and we are back to square 1. For example, a confidential association between my name and a record/stream purchase for the purpose of a substantial ticket discount in the future seems like a good compromise to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com