Last night’s NY MusicTech meetup at NYU was a hot ticket item, with over 100 people jam-packed into a small room to see presentations from StreamingTank, HFA, Loudie, MusicFirst, and Lyte. The highlight of the evening was Lyte, an innovative solution for consumers to off-load concert tickets at the last minute if they can’t attend a show.
Like many great business, Lyte was born out of a problem that needs solving. Craigslist and StubHub are a great resource for buying and selling tickets, but they aren’t terribly useful in the 24 hours leading up to showtime since you often need to meet with strangers or mail tickets. People also often get gouged with severely inflated prices. Lyte’s solution, summed up neatly on its website is “upload your e-ticket, sit back, and get an offer within 30 minutes.” The company acts as a middleman– both buying and then re-selling tickets, all while keeping prices close to face value and only taking a 15% commission fee.
Lyte released results from a recent Governor’s Ball campaign that are impressive to say the least. On the Thursday before the festival, Lyte began purchasing tickets from those who couldn’t use theirs– and reselling them to its wait list of fans looking for affordable passes. In that timeframe they outsold tickets for the festival on StubHub and sold 100% of the tickets it purchased with an average sell time of 8 minutes (Lyte’s pricing automation system can sell tickets in as little as 2 minutes). They also claim that sellers using StubHub in the same timeframe had only a 10-30% chance of successfully offloading tickets.
Payment are processed via Paypal, and Facebook login integration also helps minimize the possibility of scammers. In the future, Lyte plans to work directly with venues by offering fans the ability to sell back their tickets if they can’t use them. For now, the operation is focused on the NYC marketplace, but it’s clear Lyte is perfecting a model that can catch on in every market that hosts ticketed events of any kind.
