Jack Stephens
@iamjackstephens
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| Formerly @spotify , @songkick , @AWAL , artist mgmt & more | Music, tech, ticketing, culture
London
Joined September 2010
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When you artificially restrict ticket supply by holding dates back, and then dynamically price tickets for that restricted supply, before going on to announce additional dates...
it's hard to see how that demonstrates anything other than contempt for your audience
UK 🇬🇧
Two extra Wembley Stadium shows have been added due to phenomenal demand.
Tickets will be sold by a staggered, invitation-only ballot process. Applications to join the ballot will be opened first to the many UK fans who were unsuccessful in the initial on sale with
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@Rolo_Tamasi
Adding additional dates is very normal. Dynamically flexing the price of bog standard standing tickets whilst holding additional dates in reserve is most definitely not normal. Not in the UK at least anyway.
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@TheJacko1878
These new shows would have been booked as part of the promoter deal along with the initial shows. If you believe these have only been organised since the weekend then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
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A 17 year old just sold out 4 O2s.
Who says there are no new arena acts?
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With a timeline for the reopening of events now in front of us, ticket sales are flying. With the return of ticket buying comes the return of something nobody missed: service charges.
So what are they? Why do they exist? Where does that money go? Shall we do a 🧵?
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A proud moment to see this launch. The hope is this will have a meaningful impact for bedroom promoters and burgeoning players in the global club scene.
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Hard to fathom a post-scarcity world, but we should probably start preparing for it.
The next
@theallinpod
should just be 3 hours of
@friedberg
discussing the science behind it and societal implications.
there hasn’t been a time to be this optimistic about the future of the world since 1970. were in it for real. infinite abundance
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"I suspect the challenges to this are less technical/legal than a matter of incumbent market power and existing contracts. A universal standard married to refined technology of smart tickets is a potential game changer for the live events industry."
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Concert tickets as NFTs. Rules stipulating if/how they can be resold, who to, for how much, etc. Tied to owner/user’s identity so the artist/event organiser knows who’s actually at their show.
Going to become the norm. Just a matter of how long from now.
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I'm glad that it means we're having the collective conversation again, but why are people acting like Kanye's saying anything new here? Prince, George Michael and others have been saying this for decades, and we literally just went through it with Taylor Swift too.
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This is the future 👏👏👏
“Thanks to the built in secondary market, all of the secondary sale turnover from these [sold out event] secondary sales were kept out of the hands of scalpers and marketplaces and crucially fully retained by the event organizers.”
Unfair ticketing practices are once again the talk of the town. We are happy to inform you that it is absolutely possible to capture (all of the) value from the secondary market without screwing over fans.
Here’s proof:
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Ticketmaster take a lot of heat when things go wrong, so they should be praised when things go well.
Props to the TM team on delivering this, and props to
@TheOfficialA7X
and
@shadows_eth
for always pushing the envelope. I'm excited to see more artists make use of this feature.
Ticketmaster Debuts NFT-Gated Ticket Sales, Starting With Avenged Sevenfold - Decrypt. Thank you
@decryptmedia
for getting this right. 🙏
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@KetamineMr
@Rolo_Tamasi
Happy to be proven wrong if you can show me where standing tickets have been dynamically priced before more shows have gone on sale?
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Not only does Ed Sheeran keep his tickets (relatively) affordable, but his team and promoters do more than any other artist to prevent scalping and cancel tickets found on secondaries.
He does this at a material cost to himself for the principle. Much easier to turn a blind eye.
#Ticketmaster
what’s
@edsheeran
saying here? I think that makes perfect sense. Help the community spread the word around new ways of ticketing and even funding a gig
#OnChain
:
@onopenxyz
@LewisCapaldi
already used them once to fund a gig. 7 mln fans already used them to attend
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I wonder why no other secondary sites were willing to list tickets for these shows? 🤔 Oh yeah, because
@KilimanjaroLive
and
@edsheeran
's team made it very clear tickets resold anywhere other than
@Twickets
would be rendered void.
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You have to give it to them - Live Nation's a fascinating business!
Honestly kind of in awe about how they've built something that earns at every part of the stack. Good luck touring the UK without them being involved, directly or indirectly, at some point.
🚨NEW: Ticketmaster said ticket prices are set by promoters and artists. The artists say they leave it to the management and promoters. So I took a closer look with
@jjamesstewart
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Fairly sure the pervading fan opinion is that the live events industry would be much better off without the existence of Viagogo and their ilk
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@Alexander_W19
…because they just announced two more dates today. These would have been booked months ago. They didn’t just book and announce these new dates since Saturday. You have to reserve dates at Wembley Stadium 1 year+ in advance.
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@MintRoyale
They can just be a token issued on a purpose built protocol and exchanged for standard currency at the point of purchase. Smart contract rules then stipulate use.
@GUTStickets
already doing this with the
@GetProtocol
, demonstrating that it can work in real world application.
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"Spotify stands out from the pack for me because they actually use their listening data to communicate with fans about shows and music they are very likely to be interested in."
Thanks for the kind words
@sammyandrews
- lots more to come in 2020! 🚀
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New Burial out of nowhere... new Jai Paul out of nowhere... Spurs losing the Champions League final...
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N.B. the artist decides whether to activate dynamic pricing or not. Ticketmaster flexing the price of these tickets is done in conjunction with the promoter(s) and artist.
Dear
@TicketmasterUK
No matter how you try to justify this, it is abhorrent.
Absolute scum company.
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Can't wait until technology puts an end to the secondary ticketing market 🙏
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@aramando
@TheJacko1878
Wait until they add *more* dates at Wembley after these sell out. It’ll make more sense then.
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@_mels13
This is the first time I’ve ever seen UK concerts flex the price of standing tickets dynamically, then go on to add additional dates. Happy to be proven otherwise.
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@DaftLimmy
The bit from Queen’s Gambit where she sees the orphanage caretaker that taught her how to play chess collected all the clippings from her career?
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Hard to overstate the value of this event to aspiring artists and music industry executives. Get down to Tobacco Dock for
#IntroducingLIVE
if you work or have ambition to work in this industry. Such a good event. Well done to all involved.
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Finally rewrote this long, rambling thread on ticket scalping as a blog post
Lots of talk of ticket scalping on the timeline following that CMA report and various recent articles like this one from DJ Mag.
What is it? Why does it exist? Can it be prevented - is that really desirable or even possible? Let’s do a deep dive thread…
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Clever artists and managers (like
@dawkinscov1980
) optimising for long-term careers will price concert tickets affordably, knowing that the lifetime value of a fan that was able to attend a show is worth more over than maxing out ticket revenue potential today. 👏
Trust me we’ve worked hard to pull the cost of ticket down, and dismissed all VIP and platinum ticket options as it’s just bollox in the middle of a cost of living crisis. The pinch is real, and I take it very seriously. Others should take note 🤷🏻♂️ X
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Lots of talk of ticket scalping on the timeline following that CMA report and various recent articles like this one from DJ Mag.
What is it? Why does it exist? Can it be prevented - is that really desirable or even possible? Let’s do a deep dive thread…
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Ticketing?
I think it's safe to say that NFT's have officially disrupted the art market at this point.
Which market is next?
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@jimmpierce
This is a poor rewording of Seth Godin’s “instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
Travel should never lose its appeal no matter how wonderful your day-to-day life.
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Me entering the classroom for the talk I’m giving at
@UniWestminster
MA in Music Business Management later
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There are lots of people making headway in this space including
@GetProtocol
,
@true_tkts
,
@YellowHeartTix
, etc As with all ticketing startups, their challenge will be getting hold of desirable ticket inventory in the first place - not easy given vertical integration of incumbents
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Venues taking a cut of merch sales is a cost artists incur that few fans realise. First time I think I’ve ever seen it called out by an artist like this.
Hi
#Newcastle
sorry to say that I won’t be selling any merch tonight as
@O2CityHall
would charge me 25% + VAT. This wipes out my profit margin & I don’t think it would be fair to raise my prices & put it on you given you’ve already paid for tix, accomm, travel, etc.
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Ticket resale sites explaining how they’re listing tickets for shows that haven’t even gone on sale yet
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I wish the general public knew how many incredible ideas and innovations are regularly hamstrung by licensing bureaucracy.
me learning about all the licensing involved in livestreaming concerts
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So you see, ticketing companies having terrible reputations (generally speaking) is a feature, not a bug. The ticketing companies take the hit so that others in the value chain don't seem so bad.
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Your periodic reminder that ticketing is hard
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We've all had a chuckle about the flimsiness of the Oasis fan presale screening, but it highlights a wider point about the importance of artist teams owning and controlling fan data...
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A must listen
If you love music and business, this is an absolute must listen.
Arman Gokgol-Kline is as good as anyone I know at explaining ecosystems
We cover UMG, but really this is about the business of music writ large
This was so damn fun
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Artist management is deeper than business. It's a relationship, and it has to include trust and belief like all good relationships do. The best managers believe in their artists like nobody else.
Congrats to
@swfbailey
and
@MrBrunoMajor
. The first of many, I'm sure.
My manager
@swfbailey
holding our very first GOLD record. ‘Easily’ has gone gold in Canada!! 📀📀📀 When I was dropped by a major record label a few years ago, Sam stayed with me and believed in me when nobody else did. I was left completely broke and he lent me his personal...
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“The mystique of the music business is that, though profits are huge, accounting is incomprehensible.”
From the excellent Walter Yetnikoff autobiography ‘Howling At The Moon’.
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@CryptoAd86
@GetProtocol
I love what they’re doing and I hope it continues. Hopefully they can sign up more event organisers and grow the inventory available on their platform. 🚀
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Love the cover of the new edition of
@musicbizworld
’s Music Business UK. Great quote from Harry Magee. So very true. 💯
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@InvestLikeBest
@dmorey
An American commenting on how football (“soccer”) should be played is like an Englishman commenting on how basketball should be played. Outside of his wheelhouse, not for him to have an opinion on.
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It's actually remarkable how bad event discovery still is. I live in London and I like gigs, but then I also like comedy shows and club nights. There is no one stop shop I can go to in order to get a simplified overview of all upcoming events I might enjoy. 🤷♂️
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"Michael McIntyre marked 2018 by selling the most tickets in O2 history, reaching 409,238 with his 28th headline show at the arena"
Who are these people? And why are they choosing to spend their time and money like this?!
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Despicable stuff from Wiley. So disappointing.
Racism and hatred in all its forms needs to be called out and those responsible held to account. There’s no room for complacency or this shit will spread and proliferate.
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Hackers are now claiming they've taken control of 193 million Ticketmaster ticket barcodes, including 440k for upcoming
@taylorswift13
concerts, with a cumulative face value of >$22 billion
If this is true, it's pretty cataclysmic
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I’ve said it before but it bears repeating - Google are complicit in ticket scalping and fraud. Fans understandably go to Google to start their search for tickets. This is usually a bad idea.
Google slammed for 'benefiting' from 'rogue' tout websites as Euros tickets sell for thousands
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@The80sMuse
Why dynamically price the initial tickets if you’re “testing the market”? They would have demand signal from the presale registration anyway
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Had a call with an MBA student this morning. He didn't know what an API is...
I can't help but feel he's not being prepared for the business world of the future (or even the present, for that matter).
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Whoa... AWAL’s come a long way from a few kids messing around upstairs at RAK Studios
@xpatchx
@bigmarkyt
@tobydeh
Let’s see how many artists stick around to be part of the Sony machine...
BREAKING: Sony Music buys AWAL and Kobalt Neighbouring Rights from Kobalt Music Group
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@DrMichaelMosley
😂 this website is wild. A group exercise instructor thinking they out qualify a doctor to comment on whether people can train whilst fasted / eating below maintenance.
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👀
“Once we took over ticketing for Barclays Center [they] saw a marked decrease in concerts from Live Nation” - Jack Groetzinger, Seatgeek CEO
LN using their market power to punish non-Ticketmaster venues is expressly prohibited as part of their consent decree
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@JohnTheEssexMan
@hijakejohnstone
How is this text relevant to what’s going on here? A statue celebrating a slave trader is being removed. He’s not being erased from the history books.
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@Viking_liam92
@1aurengrace
@LapovOnor
@oasis
@TicketmasterUK
Yes they do. Please don’t spread nonsense like it’s fact.
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💯
Don’t go for the glossy heritage major just because you want their logo on your album sleeve. Go for whoever’s going to work the hardest because they’re genuinely stoked to have you on their books.
“Shop around and go where you are celebrated. Advances, budgets, and splits are all terms that are negotiable. What you can’t negotiate is a team or label executives that believe in you”
-
@Dimplez
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
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“streaming, slowly but surely, is creating a commercial ecosystem in which more artists are able to make a living”
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Interesting discussion in the replies. A good manager will involve artists in meaningful decisions and negotiations. Agree it doesn’t help anyone to keep artists in the dark about their careers.
Many problems with the musician/manager dynamic, one that I keep witnessing is artists never getting the chance to learn how to negotiate. Perpetually deferring to someone else in matters of value and conflict does nobody any good
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@LTCPLUS
Thought the comment that it "reminds me of visiting my dad in his post-divorce flat" was bang on
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You’d be amazed how common it is for artists to sign record deals, then basically just exist in a state of purgatory whilst the label keeps them from releasing their music as and when they’d like to. Control over your own release schedule is a major boon of independence.
I did an article on artists feeling stuck in limbo while in record label deals for
@guardianmusic
, pegged onto the recent
@raye
situation. There's some concerning stories in here.
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This for secondary ticketing, but with creator share at ~80%+
Exciting that with NFTs there can be a persistent “creator share” — of the sale and all transactions — that goes to the artist.
20% is common from what I’ve seen. 20% started with Medieval ship captains, and seems to work pretty well for investors. Glad it’s coming to art, too.
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This is why I'm bullish on the prospect of NFT ticket secondary sales royalties allowing artists to capture the true market value of their tickets.
The willingness to pay from the audience is there, artists just need a way to capture it.
Artists used to make most of their money on the ‘primary market’ through initial album sales.
But they always struggled to make money on the ‘secondary market’ through resales.
Now they don’t make money from either.
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As long as people insist on running events via printed paper tickets, we’re going to carry on seeing scenes such as those in Paris over the weekend
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Juggernaut. It’s startling just how far the competition are from Live Nation / Ticketmaster in the lucrative arena / amphitheater events ecosystem when laid out like this.
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@JAKAZiD
@DaftLimmy
Genuinely think the crowd would’ve gone off more if the colonel dropped this
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Excited for Altar's first foray into the real world.
We've partnered with
@SpotifyUK
on their first ever 'Altar Presents', which means excitingly both
@ElkkaMusic
&
@objectblue_
will be playing sets at our Village Underground show on Wednesday. Make sure you're there at 7.30pm to see them.
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Scalpers selling illegally obtained Taylor Swift tickets with a face value <£100 for £2k+
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The wonderful folk at
@Bandcamp
are waiving their fees on any purchases made today. Please consider supporting your favourite artists/labels directly. For me that means
@sullyE64
@mindofadragon
@prescribedavibe
@kiwirekords
@PaulWoolford
amongst others.
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Something unearthed back in the Live Nation/Songkick lawsuit...
There's a 2015 investor blog post titled "Live Nation Entertainment: An Unregulated Monopoly?" arguing that LN is indeed a monopoly
Michael Rapino shared this with top execs with the words "very smart assessment"
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Could not agree more with this sentiment.
No artists, no shows. All tickets should ultimately be theirs to distribute and sell as they see fit (for their headline shows, at least). If smart contracts can enable this then I'm all for it.
In the end, the true monopoly of the event industry lies with the creators. All we need to do is provide them the tools to break free from the current monopoly. Unfortunately that's a lot of building. Fortunately we have been doing just that for over 6 years now. Almost done.
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2010 > 2019. Nothing’s changed! Rog clearly still enjoys being picked up just as much as before. 🤥
Happy new year! 🥳
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Service charges (aka booking fees) are the ticketing company's revenue in a ticket sale. The price of the ticket, the 'face value', goes to the event organiser to cover the costs of putting the event on. But this doesn't tell the whole story.
Let's look at an example...
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@karamantha
@TungusBusko
@MeishiSmile
Tbf this did actually happen. This is the set:
SOPHIE is actually the ‘security guard’ intermittently removing stage invaders. This was before she had publicly come out as trans. There was nothing exploitative about it like Fader are implying tho.
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Another Monday, another midweek chart with incentivised pre-orders putting an album way out ahead of the pack. Let's see if streaming consumption can chase it down again...
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First proper show back last night seeing Fred Again at Village Underground and think it’s safe to say we have a new producer/artist superstar in the making
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Hard to describe what a big onsale moment at a ticketing company is like unless you’ve lived through one. Kudos to those that do it week after week.
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Big step forward for dance music on Spotify. Co-curated ‘Track IDs’ playlists launched with the likes of
@HONEYDIJON
@ShyFX
@RealBlackCoffee
and more.
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"for years we’ve tried shoehorning an old rusty remuneration model into a shiny new pair of custom-made stilettos"
@sammyandrews
on point in
@MusicWeek
! 💯
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I know it's been a long time since the NME was relevant, but it's still actually quite shocking to see them running advertorials for viagogo like this...
Pretty grim for a music mag with the history of the NME to be telling readers looking for Taylor Swift tickets that "your best bet is ticket marketplaces like Viagogo".
The music press doing the touts' work for them.
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£700+ for Oasis Wembley floor tickets on viagogo already, with the presale having gone live ~90 mins ago.
If you fail in the general sale tomorrow please at least wait for additional dates to be announced. Don't encourage this kind of predatory scalping.
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Kind of staggering that Glastonbury tickets aren’t just distributed via ballot these days. Sells out in seconds every year and the current system doesn’t seem like the fairest or most stable.
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"This is the trap of presenteeism - the mistake of equating visible desk hours with output. It is the founder’s responsibility to make sure their company doesn’t fall into that trap."
Very wise words from
@ClarkeTom
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Feel like people aren’t talking about how absolutely key Kyle Walker has been through this whole tournament. World class.
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Mourinho trying desperately to give some actual tactical insight ruthlessly cut off so Souness can trot out more inane drivel about VAR before 5 more minutes of ads.
#MUNLIV
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The slow burn Four Tet career arc from niche leftfield electronica curiosity to blowing out 3x Ally Pallys at £40 a ticket for a cool ~£1.2m gross really is something to behold and admire
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@VicBergerIV
@realDonaldTrump
These are genuine golf blisters, no? Which is hilarious in itself.
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Creative Lead - Podcasts role going at Spotify. Get involved. 🚀
SPOTIFY JOB: If you have great ideas & can handle working with me every day (it’s not for the faint-hearted) this could be the job of your dreams.
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The joy on young people’s faces:
Wonderful to see the joy on young people’s faces at the first club night in more than a year as part of our Events Research Programme. Thanks to the ERP team and to the Liverpool clubbers for delivering a successful night at
@CIRCUSmusic
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