Inside Ticketmaster: Fans, Fraud, and False Narratives

0:04Dan Runcie: I'm Dan Runcie. Welcome to Trapital, where you're about to hear a conversation about the future of ticketing with the global president of Ticketmaster, Saumil Mehta. Saumil's been in the role for roughly a year now, so we got to talk about his vision, where he sees as the opportunities and challenges, but also the strengths for Ticketmaster and where the business is going. The one theme that came through the entire conversation was clarity. Clarity on what Ticketmaster saw as its value prop and the clarity on what it does and doesn't do on the consumer side, but similarly on the B2B side as well and how it works directly with artists, venues, promoters, and others.

0:43Dan Runcie: This is a really interesting conversation, and I knew that we could have a real one with Sawmill because of how open and transparent he's been on X and other social media platforms, specifically talking about some of the challenges and misconceptions about what Ticketmaster is today, what it does and doesn't do, and where they see the business moving forward. Really enjoyed this one, and I think the audience appreciated it as well. Here's the conversation with Sawmill.

1:12Dan Runcie: This episode of Trapital is presented by Chartmetric's new AI-powered tool called Flow. And instead of me telling you about Flow, let me give you an example so you can see how powerful this is. I asked Flo this prompt here. The artist Ash is blowing up. I want you to do some exact attribution to figure out which of her social content pieces has been delivering the most growth in terms of stream counts and engagement. Well, it took two minutes for Flo to give me a specific answers with charts and everything, but I'll give you a snippet here. What the content actually did. Two things happened in sequence.

1:50Dan Runcie: First, her own account posted the song's live debut from her hometown San Jose on August 8th, which pulled 14.2 million views and 2.9 million likes, classified by Chartmetric as a performance slash tour live show post. That was followed the next day by a straight promotional clip, quote, anyway, stream stopped the wedding, end quote, at 14.4 million views and 2 million likes. And then on August 13th, a community engagement clip aimed at daughters to think of their mothers at 8.1 million views. So you can get both the qualitative in terms of understanding which types of content do resonate and also seeing the specific ones.

2:29Dan Runcie: Ash's Stop the Wedding is a very fun song, but it's always helpful to see the attribution. And this is just one of the examples of what you can do with Flow. So check it out. When you get a chance, you can go to flow.sharpmetric.com slash Trapital or check the link in our show notes.

2:50Dan Runcie: You walked out to the record-breaking Bruno Mars with the last tour that he had. A lot of tickets sold. We love it. A lot of tickets sold, indeed. We have a lot that we're going to get into. A year and a half ago, you announced that you were leaving Square and you planned to take a sabbatical, but then you had written a guest post in Lenny's newsletter about your thought about organizational structure. That catches the eye of someone that works at Ticketmaster. And then a few months later, you become the global president for Ticketmaster. So walk me through that. How did you get from I'm taking a year off to I am now running Ticketmaster?

3:28Yeah, some days I'm just as surprised as you. No, honestly, the backstory was I left Square last spring. I was running product marketing partnerships there. I'm a creature of the Bay Area, of the tech industry. I've spent the last 22-odd years working in and around tech. It's really all I know, and I'm not from entertainment, certainly not from ticketing. And last summer, I got a call from Live Nation. At the time, I was taking time off thinking about starting an AI startup, as one does in San Francisco. And I got intrigued after the first couple of conversations. main reason was as I started to unpack some of the similarities, I realized that things are actually more similar than not between something like a Square or a Block or even Ticketmaster.

4:18So first, Connect buyers and sellers did 10 years of that at Square. That's what Ticketmaster is supposed to do well. Second, flow of funds moving money around the world. So Square moves north of $200 billion a year. Ticketmaster moves$60 billion a year just in this one category. Third is a global footprint. Square was in eight countries, Ticketmaster's in 39. Big global role, that helps. Fourth, maybe nearly as important, is Square had, because of its presence as a large global fintech, a lot of challenges with bad actors, fraud, credit card fraud, payments attacks, and we have all of those problems and a lot more at Ticketmaster.

5:01So I thought that it was an interesting opportunity to apply some of the lessons from tech, from product, from fintech, and to learn whatever I needed to learn about ticketing and entertainment and bring that to the table.

5:14Dan Runcie: So that makes sense in terms of the similarities. What would you say is the North Star thing that you were brought on to do to change at Ticketmaster? I don't know that there was one, but there were a few things that we had talked about. So one is just kind of a maniacal focus on product and design. And that matters both for fans. Obviously, we're all fans in this room. I've had fan experiences with Ticketmaster, both good and less good, having been a buyer of tickets over the last 15, 20 years. The second was just like, can we kind of put design focus? And, you know, even in the Bay Area, even in Silicon Valley, there's a wide spectrum of how well design is done.

5:59And this is something that was drilled very heavily into us over the years at Square. So I think that was one. And then maybe the third one would be AI, right? So every company is working towards AI transformation. Every company is working towards how do we become AI first for a variety of reasons. They thought that I would have a great chance to take a run at it.

6:17Dan Runcie: I know you love challenges and you like to take them on specifically. And obviously, you heard plenty about Ticketmaster before you took this role. Which of those criticisms do you think is the most valid? I think it's probably worthwhile to step back and frame the issue. So what I've realized over the last 10 months is we're not selling toothbrushes. And so it's not like a standard e-commerce property. we're selling extremely scarce, extremely valuable, completely perishable, high-demand inventory. In many cases, with a deeply emotional connection between the fan and the artist, or the fan and the sports team.

7:02In a world like that, we have an opportunity to operate with more fan transparency, and we have the opportunity to better connect the desires of the artist and the team with the information that the fan has access to. So I'll give you a concrete example. Sometimes sports teams want to geofence their tickets during the playoffs, right? And they want it so that there can be home court advantage. And, you know, we had a bit of an incident a few months ago and there's a bunch of noise on social media. the opportunity we had was to have been clearer with fans because that was us following the wishes of the team and by the way all teams do this and all ticketing platforms support this but if we don't do an exceptional job of fan communication fan transparency fan education in the moment not a social media post that you sent out two days prior in the moment during the transaction flow during the checkout flow, you know, for better or worse, we're going to catch the criticism.

8:11And it's our responsibility to do more there.

8:14Dan Runcie: Following you on social media, I know that being more active and being more verbal, talking about the product has been a huge focus there. And I think historically for Ticketmaster and Live Nation overall, for years, there was less of that communication where I feel like in many ways it was almost strategic to let the artist be in front, but take a lot of the flack or the criticism that comes with that. And I feel like what I've seen you do on platforms like X and others or even communication more broadly from the company has been to say, let's try to get in front of this. Let's try to be more transparent, specifically on the consumer side.

8:49Dan Runcie: And that does feel like it's been a thoughtful shift to try to make a difference there. Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't know anything about the past. And honestly, it was not particularly strategic. It was an organic development. I've been a longtime Twitter user. I was on Twitter in 2007. And so, you know, coming up on 20 years, showing my age. But fundamentally, I had an active Twitter account and I was seeing fan complaints, some of which were completely fair. And one day I just decided to start resolving fan complaints. Like, that was as simple as it got. After that, it just started to snowball.

9:28So it wasn't particularly strategic. I mean, the theory of the case was, hey, it's better for fans and it's better for clients, whether it's artists or teams, if we humanize the experience and have a human being with a personal account who actually works at this place and is in a position of authority, speaking to fans and helping them resolve their problems. and it really wasn't anything more than that. And, you know, I've been asked in the past, I was like, oh, you know, you must have a team like doing this, right? No, it's just, it's literally just me. I'm doing this in the middle of meetings and I'm doing this late at night and I'm DMing fans with problems and I'm escalating to our team on the inside.

10:10So it's not strategic, but it is very organic. And I find it very helpful. I wish more people did it because it helps me find opportunities to serve our fans better. And that's the end of it.

10:22Dan Runcie: And since you've been doing that, if you do distinguish at all a conversation that may feel worthwhile, feel like, okay, this was an eager question, we're actually getting somewhere, or this person clearly has an agenda because of where we are. And maybe how you separate the two of those in terms of what's the most effective use of your time, given that you are running this company. It's a journey. It's a journey. It's a process. I mean, again, like I'm trying my best to not be particularly transactional about it. So I don't do things like, oh, this person has a high follower count, so I should respond to them.

10:57Like actually just look at problems. And if they feel like problems that I can help address, I jump on it. And sometimes it's a new account with 20 followers and not even a profile photo. And sometimes it's somebody with 20 ,000 followers. literally happened on my second day on the job. A fan with 170 ,000 followers was complaining about upgrades to a John Legend show. And I literally like DM them, got on the phone with them and helped them solve it. If there's an opportunity to help and if it's a fan that I can help and I could do it pretty easily, why not? Let's just do it.

11:36Dan Runcie: And speaking about fraud and bots earlier, do you ever feel like you need to determine, okay, is this an actual human being though? Or are you having a reply conversation with a bot? I don't know that I'm talking to a lot of bots, but I am talking to anonymous accounts actually frequently. And it is a bit of a trip. And now it's gotten to the point where I have anonymous accounts that DM me dark web secrets that are happening with other bots. And they're telling me what is happening on the dark web and where people are trying to find security exploits. And so, again, the amount of fraud and almost borderline industrial scale kind of criminal adjacent activity is shocking.

12:26Being able to find it just through organic engagement has been very helpful.

12:31Dan Runcie: Would you say it's a similar level of fraud and nefarious activity when you're at Square compared to Ticketmaster or is it even more with Ticketmaster? It's different. So I think there's obviously any fintech battles kind of fraud and risk and bad actors, and any fintech at scale is going to have that happen. The core difference is that the live entertainment and ticketing industry is structurally set up for this to happen. You have high demand, low supply, emotional connection, uncapped resale, and the opportunity to engage in industrial scale reselling. You add those factors together, you're going to have a particularly challenging brew.

13:22Dan Runcie: let's take a break for our chart metric stat of the week which is 10 million 10.2 million to be precise that is the number of daily streams that jay-z the 2027 super bowl halftime show headliner currently gets on the platform jay-z also has over 25 billion streams on the platform but he is one of 73 artists in the world that has over 10 million daily streams. But guess what? Guess who has 10.4 million daily streams on the platform and is just ahead of him? The artist who a lot of people think will make a guest appearance at the Super Bowl halftime show, who has graced that stage twice before? Beyonce, Jay-Z's wife, who also made an appearance at the Yankee Stadium shows.

14:07Dan Runcie: She also sits at 10.4 million streams. And number one on this list for those that are interested on the daily streams, it currently is Drake at 58.9 million daily streams. Putting out three albums in 2026 probably doesn't hurt. Let's get back to the episode. You mentioned the dark web piece earlier. On those dark webs, did anyone tell you who was behind Blue Dot Fever?

14:34It's a catchy marketing term. it's not real based upon all the data we've seen. And we've shared a bunch of this data publicly and we've looked everywhere. It's not real is the bottom line.

14:49Dan Runcie: When you say not real, not real in terms of shows not being sold out or what particular aspect? It's just not supported by the data. I mean, I think the catchy story was, oh my God, like these artists are canceling their shows. Artists cancel shows every year. And so if you look at the actual sell-through performance, if you look at the rate of cancellation, if you look at the consumer trends, everything you look at, it's basically the same or better. The other thing I've learned over the last 10 months is that the narratives that are out there are frequently under-supported, if not completely unsupported, by the actual data.

15:34Dan Runcie: What's an example of one of those? There's like very odd statements that I've seen. It's like, you must prioritize the bots, which is obviously false. I spent so much time on this area and I've looked through all of this in gory depth. It's objectively false. I mean, we spend every day, every hour trying to get tickets in the hands of fans, but it's out there. Another piece that we should talk about is just the technology itself. I have heard that people do think the technology itself is strong and promising. There's a reason that there are other companies that have switched from, whether it's SeatGeek or others, to come back to Ticketmaster because of just the underrated ability to just process that many tickets.

16:15Dan Runcie: It doesn't mean it's imperfect, but it means that they've been able to do that. Yeah, I mean, I'm a fan. I've been buying tickets on Ticketmaster, but also any and all competitors for the last 20 years. and as a point of kind of just, I mean, again, any good product person would use their own product. And so I still buy tickets all the time using my personal account with my personal card. So I'm secret shopping all the time and my team knows, and I don't know if they love it, but it happens every other week. And so as a fan, you see all the fan things in the app, all the good and the less good.

16:55What I didn't appreciate, which goes to your point, is what you are seeing as a fan is maybe a half to a third of the overall Ticketmaster ecosystem. What you don't see is all of the client-side work that occurs as a system of record that actually not only sells their tickets, but actually helps run the entire building. So you think about a stadium like SoFi or Levi's or Chase Center in San Francisco, think about all of the things that they have to do to keep the building running and to actually put on shows and put on games. They have to have maps. They have to have operations people. They have to have hundreds of scanners for entry.

17:38They have to have integrations with their point of sale systems. They have to have a CRM. They have to do marketing. They have to have their own app. The app is powered by us, by the way, the Warriors app or any kind of sports team app that we work with. They have to do financial settlements. all of this stuff is all powered by Ticketmaster and it's stuff that none of you ever see. And that stuff has been built and built robustly for many, many years. And it is one of the reasons why clients continue to renew and come back, which is something that you never know about as a fan.

18:13Dan Runcie: And I do want to talk more about the client side specifically, because as you mentioned, there are a lot of renewals. I'm sure you've heard a lot of the frustrations as well, because it seems like the through line is like, technology is great, the product is great, but from a transparency perspective, the control, menu selection, routing, and some of those are challenges that I've heard on the B2B side, but I've heard it from the agents. I've heard it from others as well in the space. So what are your take on some of those criticisms about Ticketmaster as it stands? So I'm interpreting your question as, do venues feel like they have choices?

18:49I think that's the thrust of your question.

18:50Dan Runcie: That's one of it. So venues feeling like they have choices and then the talent as well and the folks that represent the talent, like any fees that are associated for particular parts that they want to participate in the economics or just overall routing these things and just how costly that can be as a result of the lack of choice. There's a nuanced topic, but a valuable one. And so it's worth covering. So at a headline level, I would like categorically reject that venues don't have choices. Like I would categorically reject that point, even though it's out there in the media. I have participated in many, many, many renewals over the last 10 months, and I'm fully aware of how competitive it is.

19:36And every renewal we go up on, whether it's sports teams or clubs or theaters or amphitheaters, I mean, you name it, there are competitors bidding for those venues. those rights to be in those buildings are getting more expensive. There is no question about it. There are detailed RFPs where every feature that we have or don't have is checked against what competitors have or don't have. So the financials and the product and the service are all extremely competitive dimensions. I know what the narrative is, but I live this every day and I categorically reject that venues don't have choices. So that's one.

20:19Then there's the other part, which is, okay, now that the venue is with us or with SeatGeek or somebody else for that matter, what is the experience of the artist? This industry in the US is an exclusive industry. So the venue contracts are exclusive. That is factual. And that means, and that is just as true for us as it is for anybody else. So in buildings where our competitors have an exclusive contract, if the artist wants to play in that building, it is the same as it is with Ticketmaster. There's no difference. So it's not as if we are treated better or worse. It's just the industry in the United States is set up on an exclusive model with venues.

21:05Now, I should note that this is not true in every country, Right. So in the UK, it is set up on an allocation model where every large venue actually has multiple ticketing vendors that they work with in parallel at the same time. And so we will sell a chunk of the tickets and our competitor in real time for the same event on the same date will sell a chunk of the tickets. And that is perfectly fine, too. And we've been doing business in the UK for a long time, quite successfully, I might add. I mean, there is a structural dynamic in the U.S. that is different from the U.K. as an example, or many parts of Europe for that matter.

21:40That's a structure under which we all live as an entire ecosystem, whether it's a fan or me as the person who works at Thickmaster or the venue themselves. And if that changes over time in the United States, then we are perfectly willing and able to respond. And I have empirical evidence that we've done it in the U.K., so that's fine.

22:02Dan Runcie: And in terms of, like you said, you saying that venues do have choices where you feel like that narrative is incorrect. Where do you feel like the disconnect come from from the reality that you're seeing versus where you feel like the public narrative? I don't know. This complex dynamic of the industry has been around for a while. Like it's not like AI where the entire industry is three years old. So the industry has been around 40 odd years, right? And narratives build up and calcify over long periods of time. And so I've inherited 40 plus years of decisions and narratives, both good and less good.

22:36And that's okay. I mean, again, my mission and my message to our team is come in here, compete every day, build better products, and know that if we continue to build better products and do great work for fans and artists and teams, we will get picked. And if we don't, we will lose clients and we will deserve to lose clients. And it's a free market. It's wildly competitive, no matter what some news clipping says. And so I act like it.

23:07Dan Runcie: And I know since you're coming up on a year, you likely have things that you want to continue to achieve. Is it ever difficult to achieve any of the goals that you want, given the looming regulation challenges? No, no, no, no. For better or worse, I come at it from a very product-minded viewpoint, which is you're going to come in and you're going to have to compete. And if you compete for clients and fans, everything's going to be okay. And if we don't compete for clients and fans, regulatory or otherwise, we're going to have huge problems. And so it's very binary for me. Come in and build the best product, provide exceptional service to clients and fans, and everything will be okay.

23:45And if we don't, regulation or otherwise, we're going to have huge problems.

23:49Dan Runcie: Well, I would love to continue, but we will pause there. But Sawmill, I appreciate you spending the time with us. Ladies and gentlemen, Sawmill Mehta. Thank you.

24:25Dan Runcie: still the best way to grow. And if you're not already following us, tap that follow button, tap that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you get podcasts. Make sure that Trapital shows up. We drop episodes weekly. And if you have a few moments, leave a comment, leave a review. That helps make sure that Trapital reaches the right people. Thanks again. Talk to you next time.