Ticombo establishes an open source and fair ticket marketplace
In 2025, the live music business will have changed beyond all recognition. With Live Nation announcing that 2024 “was live music’s biggest year yet, as artists toured the world and fans turned out in record numbers,” where approximately 151 million fans worldwide attended close to 550,000 Live Nation events, the industry is on track for further explosive growth. According to the QY Research forecast, the global live music industry will have an extra $17.99 billion opportunity between 2025 and 2029, and a CAGR of 11.2 percent.
But beneath this surge, there’s a complex web of challenges: the average U.S. concert ticket price has skyrocketed up to $144, up 45 percent over 2019 (enter the outrage of fed-up fans), and consumers are struggling with transparency, scalping, and the constant threat of counterfeit tickets. Introducing Ticombo, a Berlin-based company pioneering a new method of how the music industry interacts with ticketing technology, transparency, and fan engagement.
Even though 71 percent of event ticketing providers increased prices in 2024, a full 47 percent of consumers believe they will not spend less on tickets, while 30 percent say they will pay more. This resiliency is a function of what experts refer to as “funflation” — the tendency for people to increasingly spend some of their disposable income on leisure activities in an otherwise inflationary environment, leading to profound shifts in ticketing behavior, pricing structures, and fan engagement.
The industry is grappling with a fundamental contradiction: While demand is strong, surveyed fans say they expect to attend roughly a third fewer events in 2025, cherry-picking bucket list shows and bypassing midlevel outings. FTX’s sip- or guzzle-from-a-firehose approach to which fund to pick focuses on breathing-I-think-they’re-awake-on-that-transatlantic-flight levels of interest, and this more-restricted attendance change is beginning to play into how those platforms price their wares, market those funds and retain their existing customers.
The war on ticket scalping has sparked monumental transformations in how events manage the release and allocation of tickets. Blockchain-driven ticketing platforms present a promising answer in responding to these challenges by providing secure and auditable transactions and monitoring ticket ownership efficiently. This technology revolution opens up new doors for fan engagement at live music events.
Virtual concert technology is helping to work around that gap, bringing artists and fans together across the globe, and two-tiered ticketing solutions are on the rise, events that are created specifically to cater to live and remote fans. The future is not over physical or virtual concerts — it’s about uniting them with experiences that make every fan feel like they matter.
Ticombo’s vision is to revolutionize how the fan experiences purchasing tickets to attend their favorite live event by establishing the world’s first Organizer-Based Ticket Marketplace, where organizers, resellers, and fans can buy and sell tickets in an open, secure, and fair environment. The platform has gained great traction with the market as the “world’s largest marketplace with 1 million followers on Facebook” and “the most followed of all reselling platforms in Europe”.
The company’s solution targets three common pain points in the space that are particularly relevant to music event ticketing. With its lack of transparency, legacy platforms hide important information about the seller, when your order will arrive, and what you’ll actually be charged, until the very end of the buying process. Music events, especially popular concerts and festivals, are often rife with event tickets scalped by fraudulent sellers. The resale market for music tickets is frequently overheated, unregulated, and lacks consumer protection.
