Thank you.
I'm going to focus on three areas in my opening comments. The first is about the user considerations, the second about business considerations and the third about how, possibly, to expand the market and access.
First of all, I'll talk about improvements and consistency in the user experience.
User frustration is caused by many things, most of which relate to the speed at which the tickets are sold and the high competition for these tickets, which brings the price, sometimes, very high. This is, of course, for the most popular shows. There will never be enough tickets to meet demand for these shows.
Online ticketing has many aspects, and prices change rapidly, going both up and down. On websites, there is sometimes indication that the price will vary. Sometimes that's in pop-up windows on screen, sometimes it's in the terms and conditions of purchase and sometimes it's in other places, but this is inconsistent. The user experience is not consistent, and having a persistent reminder that this change in pricing is the nature of ticket pricing would help users remember that this is a very competitive market.
Users have some methods to shape their own user experience. For instance, if there were legislation that said there had to be pop-ups, users can choose on their own to block pop-ups.
I have some screenshots if they're useful for the conversation later and for your questions, but you can easily see by looking at these sites that if you'd looked on, for instance, Ticketmaster for the Raptors game seven the other night, you'd have seen there were no tickets available. However, if you'd looked at StubHub for the same game, you'd have seen there were tickets available. Even the StubHub Canada site has prices in U.S. dollars. These are all things that can be addressed to make the user experience more consistent and clearer.
The second area I'd like to look at is the business considerations: operational concerns for live business promoters and for ticketing companies. The term “slow ticketing” has come into use. This term is used to describe a practice where the instant gratification aspect of online shopping is intentionally slowed down so that the event organizers can have some control over which category of ticket buyer can be first to purchase tickets for an event. By using slow ticketing, the event organizers understand that, by slowing down the sales process, they may make less money on the event than if they let sales happen at the fastest rate set by ticket demand.
In order to decide whether to continue using a slow-ticketing strategy, one question I raise is how businesses would measure the slow-ticketing strategy's success. For example, there would probably be fewer sold-out shows, but the total revenue might be higher because the top ticket prices might be higher.
Also, the slow-ticketing strategy may lead to more show cancellations by promoters because of low ticket sales, since buyers may think they should wait, in case prices go down. This type of cancellation might reduce the overall number of ticketed events and might reduce the overall revenue for the industry.
If improved and targeted artificial intelligence increasingly personalizes online ticket selling, what's the most important future benefit for ticket sellers, and where do online ticket sellers see the greatest value in developing new artificial intelligence tools for their industry? This relates to ways in which the government might support advances in AI in this business.
Another thing to look at is what the main behavioural differences are between sports and music ticket buyers. How could or should an online ticket seller tailor the buying experience differently?
Finally, in this section about operational considerations for visual art, in some countries there's a resale right. What this means is that every time a work is resold, the original artist receives payment. Information about this type of resale right is available on the CISAC website. We could think of this right to be eventually applied to the resale of concert tickets.
The third area I'd like to look at in my opening statement is expanding the market, expansion of access. Since there won't be enough seats for everyone who wants to attend a blockbuster event, the live industry could look at ways to expand access, for instance, simultaneous broadcast into theatres where people could gather with friends to enjoy a communal experience with high-quality sound and wide-screen image. Ticket sales for the in-theatre experience would go back to the performers and presenters of the show.
For sports, there already is an infrastructure for this that provides, via TV networks and sports leagues, both in-home and in-group, such as sports bars, those types of locations for people to enjoy the event live. The one thing to think about would be, how could this work for the non-league entertainment industry that is live music?
Thank you.