Ticket Sales Trends – Share Your Thoughts!

​Type:  Blog
Written By:  Kelly Brennan, FutureTix / TriTix
February 29, 2020
 
At FutureTix, one of my current responsibilities is to stay abreast of what’s going on in the ticketing industry, including sales and revenue trends, new technologies and best practices, mergers / acquisitions and more.  To do this, I have a series of alerts from a variety of sources that email me on a regular basis when anything ticketing or related is published online.  I spend time every day weeding through these articles and various types of posts to find relevant news to share with FutureTix staff, ticketingSOURCE Members, FTInsider subscribers and our clients, as well as the TriTix Membership.  

One of the most common types of articles that I see each week are press releases written with the sole purpose of letting the world know that ticket sales and/or revenue at a particular venue / organization or in a particular region of the world are either up or down from the previous years (or were astonishing in some way).  You can find a few samples of articles below from this week’s alerts: 
 
Sample Articles

• Miami Football Season Ticket Sales Up 10 Percent (Source:  Canes Warning)
• WWE Ticket Sales Reach Historic Low Leading Up To WrestleMania (Source: TicketNews)
• More than 59000 Tickets for Husker Spring Game So Far, Bill Moos Says… (Source: Omaha World-Herald)
• 10000 $2 NY State Fair Ticket Sell Out In A Flash (Source: Syracuse.com)

 
I see loads of these types of articles each week.  Overall, our research at FutureTix points to the fact that as an industry we continue to sell more tickets each year and bring in more revenue than the previous year.  However, it also shows that more events are being ticketed than ever before, meaning our industry has expanded to include events and ticket sales it did not previously include (either because they didn’t exist or they were tracked manually without the assistance of a ticketing platform).  

This makes me think… How much of the increase in ticket sales and revenue is due to the expansion of the industry and how much can be directly related to the fact that patrons are purchasing more tickets or paying more money than years prior? 

Sometimes, I have to ask myself… what is the overall trend for ticket sales and revenue in the US today?  Are patrons purchasing more tickets overall?  Are they spending more money?  Or could it be that, in general, many venues and organizations are seeing a decrease in ticket sales and revenue, and the growth and expansion of the industry (new types of events being ticketed for the first time) is offsetting that decrease in revenue when we look at the industry as a whole? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Are you sales continuing to increase?  Is your organization bringing in as much revenue as previous years?  Do you think the ticketing industry is continuing to grow and expand each year?  Or at the very least stable? 

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Should you feel up to it, please use the chat area below to let us know your thoughts.  But at the very least, I urge you to think about our industry on a higher level.  How can we keep the ticketing industry relevant and thriving for years to come?  Or are we already setup for success?