CashorTrade Continues Face Value Movement With Updated App, Primary Ticketing Integration, Disco Biscuits Commercial

From humble beginnings trading tickets under a canopy at Phish shows to debuting its latest app on Bloomberg TV, the CashorTrade ticket exchange platform continues to gain momentum with artists, venues and fans.

“Every time I have a conversation about CashorTrade and Brando and I talk about it, we try to move away from this concept of an app or a website,” says CashorTrade co-founder Dusty Rich, referring to his brother and fellow co-founder. “We lean into the fact we were the leaders and the pioneers of this face value movement and we need a single voice and a single message for people to get behind.”

The CashorTrade concept is simple: allowing fans to securely list, trade or sell (at face value) concert tickets to events of all kinds, charging only a 10 percent insurance and escrow fee per transaction – or $4 per month for “gold member” subscribers. The platform has caught on with not only fans but artists and venues, becoming official partners with artists including Phish, Billy Strings, Goose, MJ Lenderman and others, including recent additions in Stick Figure and The Disco Biscuits, who even released their own commercial celebrating the partnership.  

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The company plans to announce API integrations with three major ticketing companies in the next two months, according to a representative. 

As the Dead & Co. residency continues at Sphere in Las Vegas, CashorTrade notes it had nearly $6 million worth of face value tickets listed on the platform during the band’s 2024 residency, showing the strength of the grassroots face value movement even as the industry gets higher-tech and more sophisticated than ever. 

Co-founder Dusty Rich spent some time with Pollstar to explain more and continue the face-value momentum.

Pollstar: What can you tell us about the new version of your app?
Dusty Rich: The infrastructure that we had built  from the parking lots of 2009 had outgrown its ability to scale. In order to move this company forward into different verticals, we would need a platform that could be more modular, and the ability to partner with primary ticketing companies and artists to the service to be used through their platforms. Some events could just simply turn on CashorTrade and avoid the operational and financial risks of running a resale solution on their own, and regain the benefits of unlocking new revenue, key consumer insights, decreasing credit card chargebacks, eliminating no-show rates and increasing their customer lifetime value. That was the value proposition of the new platform. 

Then, from the customer perspective, the whole new UX with  better search features us allows us to integrate social components such as implementing a ticket wallet. You could upload the tickets to the shows that you’re going to, even if you weren’t selling them, and then that would provide visibility to turn on to your friends, similar to an “interested event” post on Facebook. 

CashorTrade is a largely a grassroots, hands-on movement, though. And so is the service.
A face value movement doesn’t just mean a nice UX, it requires pushing. Just like if you wanted to make big global change, it requires a lot of different prongs. One, being a great application, two being good B2B relationships, three being relationships with artists. We’re on the steering committee as the only secondary company with Fix The Tix in the National Independent Venue Association to push for legislation like the Fans First Act and the TICKET Act, for instance.

How do the artist partnerships work?
They add us to their feed button on their website for one, two, they directly push their traffic to the marketplace. Three, they will promote with giveaways where the band will give away tickets and VIP tickets to drive awareness, and they work with us to help protect their groups on these social networks. 

Are there are a lot of bad actors trying to infiltrate your service? How do you police people listing tickets for bogus prices or tickets they don’t possess?
Our algorithms kind of flag a lot of those things. The tickets are largely on mobile wallets, so not many people screenshot a bar code anymore, and the QR codes these days are revolving and changing. The technology is making it easier for us to validate. That’s another reason why the primary integration will be huge.

The dream is to almost have the CashorTrade logo, like a Facebook logo, at the bottom of every artist’s website. So when their tickets sell out or they don’t, you could click the CashorTrade button knowing they align their brand with the face value movement, which helps give the consumer an understanding that this is an artist who cares about the fan and, if I can’t make the show, I can upload my ticket there. 

You are promising upcoming announcements with multiple primary ticketing providers, which sounds like a game changer for CashorTrade.

It’s a really exciting time for us. We, you know, we’ve waited so many years to finally come to this part. There’s a lot of work to get there right now at this moment in time, with our advisory board, the movement in the industry. It’s never been more exciting, primary ticketing integration. I really do believe that we can see the face value movement hit the mainstream in the coming months.