The Denver City Council appears ready to announce a new $5 million deal with AXS, a subsidiary of Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz’s AEG firm, that enables AXS to behave as the exclusive ticket-seller for all city-owned places .
The contract, up for renewal Monday, follows a previous five-year contract using AXS who had the firm selling tickets to events in Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Bellco Theatre, Denver Coliseum, McNichols Building, the Buell Theatre and the Ellie Caulkins Opera House.
Once the contract begins, every promoter — like the nationally dominant Live Nation — will likely be asked to use AXS when booking and promoting a new show at a place like Red Rocks, no matter how it sells tickets elsewhere.
Even the contract-renewal vote is arriving after the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee last week started a research in to AEG, Live Nation, StubHub and other top firms for what lawmakers have described as possibly deceptive practices, according to The Hill.
“Many of these issues relate to a lack of transparency and fairness, which puts purchasers at an unfair advantage when trying to buy tickets at the present market,” read a letter sent to the ticketing firms.
On the other hand, the AXS system has worked well for the town of Denver, and a significant corporate player is required to manage the volume and complexity of ticketing at city-owned venues, stated Brian Kitts, spokesman for Denver Arts & Venues.
“When the previous AXS contract went into effect (five years ago), just about all our tickets were hard paper tickets,” Kitts stated. “Now I might say that 95% introduced in the gates as well, and of what we do is marketed digitally. ”
Technology has changed ticketing into a virtual affair in the past few years, but it has not addressed consumer complaints about the fairness of the process. Fluctuating prices, ticket-buying bots and confusing secondary-market earnings have left several ticket-buyers feeling defeated — as if RiNo Art District place Mission Ballroom has been forced to cancel hundreds of ticket purchases for a Tame Impala concert in August.
AEG Presents Rocky Mountains, that opened Mission before this season and reserved the Tame Impala series, said that it had been overrun with complaints by AXS customers who mentioned exorbitantly priced aftermarket tickets as their sole choice, based on The Denver Channel.
“These ticketing companies know the customer behaviour and therefore are out there essentially just using a market,” stated Josh Katzfounder of New York-based ticketing supplier YellowHeart, that is endorsed by blockchain engineering. “It’s a non-transparent market and lovers are absolutely being hurt. ”
City officials haven’t heard any significant concerns complaints — customer or about AXS under the prior contract, Kitts said. He explained the efficiency of the AXS platform as one of its benefits.
“E-tickets help cut back on scalping, that I believe even the Broncos would attest to,” he said. “And if we settled that ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) litigation in Red Rocks this past year, that was actually something that was written into the consent decree — that those tickets had to be marketed and delivered digitally. ”
The machine also makes sense from an accounting perspective, Kitts said, citing the previously unreliable “honour system” the town used with concert promoters before 2015.
“It makes it a lot much easier to collect city earnings tax,” Kitts stated. “It had been actually around the discretion of their prior promoters to tell us how many tickets they sold and also pay a tax according to that. For the previous five decades we’ve ever been able to determine precisely how many tickets have been sold because they undergo a system that we have access to. ”
The city’s purchasing department ran the contract proposal process, which initially netted five respondents prior to the town whittled down the candidates to AXS and Ticketmaster. Kitts said he “might like to think” Denver City Council members have been put to renew the deal with AXS, given that the relationship AXS and the town has built since 2015.
Denver City Council members couldn’t be contacted for comment as of press time Friday.
The $5 million deal, which also pays for AXS staffers in venue box offices, once more requires AXS to get $3 for every ticket purchased. The town also guarantees it will sell at least 300,000 tickets annually through AXS and also pay a penalty if it does not fulfill that objective.
Even though Live Nation overlooks the national concert-promotion industry, it ranks No. 2 at the Denver market behind AEG Presents Rocky Mountains, that novels roughly 1,000 concerts in Colorado annually. AEG Presents runs the majority of the non-municipal professional music venues in the Denver-Boulder area, including Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre and the Ogden, Gothic and Bluebird theaters.
AEGin partnership with Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, also runs the FirstBank Center at Broomfield.
AXS, a wholly owned subsidiary of AEG Presents (previously AEG Live), has been started in 2011. Officials in AEG weren’t readily available for comment on Friday. AXS officials declined to comment through a spokesman to this story.
Buy Tickets for every event – Sports, Concerts, Festivals and more buy tickets dot com concerts
