Ticketmaster’s Face Value Play: ‘Every Ticket Will Be Eligible’ For Resale Via CashorTrade

More details are emerging about Ticketmaster’s recent integration with face-value ticket exchange CashorTrade, with Global Head of Music and Executive VP David Marcus confirming that every ticket will be available for face-value resale through the platform.

“Initially we started with a handful of bands to test it out, but we’re going to be whitelisting all 100 percent of the events on Ticketmaster to be available at CashorTrade,” Marcus told Pollstar during an interview at the Pollstar Live! conference last week. “Artists don’t need to opt in to this. It’s good for them regardless.” The integration between platforms is complete and CashorTrade will be active on concert tours soon, Marcus said.

In early April, Ticketmaster announced a partnership with the independent ticket exchange platform founded in 2009 by brothers Brando and Dusty Rich, which grew to official partnerships with artists like Phish, Stick Figure, Waxahachtee the Disco Biscuits and many others. The service offers a peer-to-peer platform allowing buyers and sellers to interact directly and trade or resell tickets, all at face value.

While operating independently and gaining momentum for years, CashorTrade’s top brass admits it is difficult and tedious to validate the value of tickets it is not the primary source of, something now possible with Ticketmaster, where many of the tickets on the platform originate.

“Being able to work with Ticketmaster to validate the face value price is a huge step forward to making sure that all tickets are face value,” CEO and co-founder Brando Rich says. “It’s not as easy as it seems when you’re trying to run a third-party platform trying to gather data, look at receipts and et cetera. This not only builds buyer confidence across the board, but is going to build confidence in the marketplace itself.”

Marcus says the partnership builds on tools Ticketmaster has built toward a core desire of artists.

“Artists want tickets to go to fans at the price they set,” said Marcus, with examples including Ticketmaster’s own face value resale platform that launched in 2019. “What these guys (at CashorTrade) are doing is helping fans engage in behaviors that they’d like to engage in anyway. What we’re doing with the broader partners, the face-value exchange, direct-to-fan transfer, is important because it makes one of our products more compelling, easier to use for fans and for artists.”

He says unlocking the social aspect and allowing fans to interface with one another builds community and adds fairness when in-demand tickets are scarce and lead to bad actors looking to capitalize.

“All the other solutions are susceptible to anonymity on the buy side,” Marcus says. “If I’m a fan and I post a ticket for face value in an anonymous marketplace and there’s no restriction on the buyer, that buyer’s gonna be a broker, because they’re just too good at it. These guys have built in a peer-to-peer component, an offer-and-request component that helps solve that problem. There’s no other platform in the face value space. There’s no other platform in the resale space that has that check built into it.”