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Paul Kelly Joins SeatlabNFT From Ticketmaster
SeatlabNFT announced that Paul Kelly is joining the team as head of global strategy. The Australian brings a wealth of top-level commercial and marketing experience with him to further SeatlabNFT’s growth.
Kelly was formerly head of commercial partnerships at Ticketmaster and spent 11 years with the company. He experienced continual promotion up the ranks to senior commercial and marketing roles and was responsible for business development and management of $10 million-plus in advertising revenue and $100 million-plus in partner ticket revenue, according to the hiring announcement.
See: SeatlabNFT Announces $1.2M Event Creator Fund
Kelly was instrumental in delivering Ticketmaster Australia and New Zealand’s 2022 strategic plans and is now relishing the fresh challenges at SeatlabNFT.
“I’ve seen many competitors come into the ticketing landscape over the last ten years, none as compelling as SeatlabNFT. SeatlabNFT is perfectly positioned at a game-changing confluence, a Web3 technology revolution, and a live event industry well overdue for disruption,” said Kelly. “Three key factors plague the live event industry: bots, scalping and fraud. SeatlabNFT’s technology shuts the door on all three. What gives me the most excitement is SeatlabNFT leveraging Web3 technology to form closer connections between fans, artists and event organizers. It is a groundbreaking innovation previously unseen in the live event space.”
With Paul Kelly in the team, SeatlabNFT’s mission to revolutionize the secondary ticket market takes another big step forward. SeatlabNFT is a NFT-powered event ticketing system that artists and event organizers can utilize “to regain control of the secondary market,” as the company states. The UK-based company recently announced a £1million ($1.2 million) Event Creator Fund to help artists and event organizers with the cost of running live events post-COVID.
SeatlabNFT director Ryan Kenny recently explained to Pollstar the difference between a regular blockchain tickets and a NFT ticket. Kenny said, “NFTs natively live on a blockchain, in our case a carbon neutral chain called NEAR, they’re not completely separate things. We provide the tools for NFTs to become programmable tickets. We can set things like price ceilings, transfers, secondary sale royalty spilts and we can also attach collectibles and digital merchandise to these tickets. Therefore adding more value to the end user, whilst still preventing ticket fraud and substantially limiting ticket touting.
See: Tackling Ticketing With Blockchain Technology
“For organizers, we open up unparalleled control of the secondary market and make it almost impossible for touts to operate at scale. We also allow them to capitalise on digital merchandise, assets and to utilise gamification via the wallet to improve the event experience and encourage a much closer relationship between fan and artists/organiser.
“Additionally we give organisers the ability to interact with their fans before, during or after events via their wallet mobile application and can provide a greater level or insight into user behaviour than traditional ticketing.”