Followers of entertainment tech news will likely have heard of the successful ICO currently underway for GUTS.tickets, a platform that seeks to bring ticketing for concerts and gigs into the 21st century by eliminating the predatory reseller market with Blockchain technology. Their platform will work with performers to release the tickets on the platform, which will control how much they can be resold for and ensure the ticket is 100 percent authentic and unique.
There was more news today from the company with their announcement of a partnership with Chris Payne, agent with International Talent Booking (one of the most high-profile performance booking agencies in the world). Payne joins the GUTS team as a senior advisor.
Industry experience
GUTS will look to leverage Payne’s experience in the sector to refine the platform functionality and also increase their reach with future participating performers. In the nascent Blockchain industry it is often said that too many projects lack feasible real-world targets, so someone with Payne’s clout should bring a lot to the table.
“Payne has spent years observing one of the most powerful and pervasive sectors within the music industry. His goal is to bring GUTS technology to events worldwide, and show artists and promoters how to take back control of the ticketing process.”
A comprehensive platform
GUTS have designed their platform that forms “a Blockchain based event ticketing protocol used by ticketing and booking companies that will make exorbitant secondary market ticket prices and ticket fraud occurrences of the past. The protocol will offer these features while providing absolute transparency for all actors involved.”
The whole thrust of the GUTS project is to shine a light into the dark corners of the entertainment issue by leveraging the security and transparency of decentralized ledger and Blockchains – ensuring oversight during the whole lifetime of the ticket.
This may seem like a trivial problem to solve, but in context you start to realize the value a small change like this could bring. As explained by the GUTS team in their whitepaper:
“Thirty percent of all tickets are resold with markups between 30 percent and 700 percent. The ticket market is non-transparent, and inexplicable transaction costs added to tickets are common practice among ticketing companies… Professional resellers create unnecessary scarcity in the ticket-acquisition process, creating confusion about the price and availability of tickets. Their intrusion into the process imposes a burden on fans and threatens artists’ revenue from live performances: events which are becoming increasingly crucial to artists’ success. Instances of ticket fraud compound these problems, as many fans are denied access to events because they were sold an invalid, fake, or already scanned ticket.”
The GUTS platform token, GET, was launched two weeks ago and the ICO has reached stage two of the crowdsale.