Episode 118: Building a Live Events Subscription Marketplace with Ed Vincent at festivalPass

May 30

Ed Vincent, Founder and CEO of festivalPass, has a passion for live events and music festivals. In the early 2000s, he started an experiential marketing company that worked with a lot of big, interesting brands that they brought into live events like concerts, festivals and film festivals. This led to eventually owning a film festival in the Dominican Republic that included a hotel that was built and branded with Maxim magazine.

These experiences are what made him fall in love with live events. A few years later, he had a business data analytics company that worked in the entertainment space, doing data analysis and strategy for brands like A&E Network, AMC Networks, film studios and ticketing firms.

One of his clients was a company called MoviePass, which was an account he spent so much time on, he became their de facto Chief Data Officer for 18 months. Ed says the MoviePass business model was flawed and unsustainable, but he liked the idea of an entertainment subscription service model.

He took what he learned from his MoviePass experience, both good and bad, and combined it with his passion for festivals and live events, and started festivalPass. There hadn’t been any innovation in the live events industry in decades. Getting tickets to a festival or concert was strictly transactional, and customers were fed up with the high mark-ups and fees the ticket brokers and resellers were charging.

I thought there could be a huge market for a place where people who were passionate about festivals and concerts could have a frictionless buying experience while building a community with others who shared that passion.

Buying with credits

The fatal flaw that Ed saw at MoviePass was that they put growth above all else, and ended up simply subsidizing tickets with their flat-rate, unlimited-use monthly subscription cost. He looked at a company called ClassPass, a subscription service for fitness enthusiasts, as a better model.

At ClassPass, members pay a monthly rate in exchange for credits. With this model, they can control costs and make a small profit on all of the classes, which can vary widely in cost. Some classes might cost ten credits and others might cost 50 credits. The choice of which classes to take is up to the individual.

After spending time with some of the people at ClassPass who were instrumental in creating the credit-based currency, Ed knew that was going to be the model he could use to transform the live event business.

With the credit-based model, members at festivalPass today pay a monthly fee in exchange for credits, and they can spend those credits on tickets for more than 80,000 live events. There’s also an added value in that they’re getting those tickets cheaper than they can get them through traditional channels because there are no large ticketing and processing fees.

The festivalPass business model

The ticketing industry consists of primary and secondary ticketing companies. There are about 100 primary ticketers in the market, with the most famous being Ticketmaster. The secondary vendors include companies like StubHub and Vivid Seats that resell tickets with 40 - 60% fees on top of the face-value price.

Ed isn’t looking to disrupt or change those traditional business models, he’s looking to offer an alternative. His goal with festivalPass is to create a lane where like-minded people with a passion for live events can build a community, engage with each other, get tickets at a lower price and get other value-added perks like drink discounts or exclusive meet and greets.

They currently have three basic tiers, priced at $19, $49 and $99 a month. The biggest difference between the tiers is the number of credits you get each month. As you move up, the cost of each credit comes down so you get more bang for your buck.

Customer acquisition

One of the ways festivalPass acquires new customers is through a referral program. A member receives credits when they refer a friend to sign up for a membership. There is a multiplier, so members at the $99 level get more credits per referral than members at the $19 or $49 level. The math works out to $6 - $7 dollars per referral, so someone who is really active in that program can earn enough credits for free tickets over time.

They rely heavily on paid social media for their marketing efforts. They have studied the data, and they know that over time, around 10% of the members they onboarded with free memberships converted to paying members.

They have begun testing the influencer world recently with promising results. They have had a few dozen influencers join their program, and they usually become mega fans because the products that festivalPass sells, concerts and live events, are what those influencers are already passionate about. They amplify the credits influencers get even more than their highest-tier members, which makes the influencer even more excited about participating in the program.

The lifetime membership

The company is currently offering a limited number of lifetime memberships. When someone signs up, they immediately get $1,200 in credits, and they will continue to get $1,200 in credits every year for as long as they remain a member.

That lifetime membership is delivered via a digital asset or NFT that the member actually owns. That means that the owner could use their membership for five, ten or 20 years and then sell it potentially for more than they paid for it.

The company is only selling 10,000 lifetime memberships, and they are being sold in cohorts of 1,000. They are currently on the initial cohort, which costs around $1,800. Once the first 1,000 are sold, the price will go up and they will start selling the second 1,000. This will continue until all 10,000 memberships are sold.

Ed is counting on lifetime members to become superfans because they are going to get a lot of value as lifetime members, and they are going to go to a lot of events. In turn, they’ll probably tell all their friends and family about what a cool company festivalPass is, which is great for referrals.

The future of festivalPass

The company is working on a system of micro subscriptions or badges that they can sell to certain venues. A member could pay a small extra fee to get a micro subscription to their favorite live venue. That venue would then offer different value-added things, like special access to events at that venue or a discount on beverages and merchandise.

The company is also looking at AI and tools like ChatGPT to create better descriptions of the venues and shows for increased SEO purposes. Ed is also a big believer in Web3, and they are creating crypto wallets that will automatically be generated for customers when they sign up, so they don’t have to go through the learning curve involved in signing up for a crypto wallet. Like lifetime memberships, this will allow members to sell or exchange their credits in the future in a secure way.

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