Eventfinda Aims To Disrupt Australia’s Ticketing Sector With TixSuite

Ask any Australian promoter, venue, festival, or event to name their two biggest challenges, and they’ll come up with ten.

But pin them down to just two, and they’ll suggest it was cash flow and the growing trend among fans not to commit to buying tickets early enough.

Today (April 10) marks the launch of TixSuite, a new subscription ticketing software that will address some of these issues.

It promises “to tear up the rulebook”, with the goal of fixing the broken, outdated methods of legacy ticketing services.

TixSuite is the latest product from ticketing platform Eventfinda, which has headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand, and has been serving the Australian market since 2011.

So, why is the Australian ticketing market ready for disruption? “The timing is perfect because of the way technology has moved,” Eventfinda CEO James McGlinn explained this week.

“Every organisation, whether inside the music industry or outside of it, is using software-serving tools for all aspects of its operations.

“But we’re all having the same challenges with the global economy the way it is. Everyone’s having to work that much harder.

“So, for those partners we’re working with, such aspects as opportunities for revenue streams and how quickly they're engaging their audience, these are brought to sharp focus.”

He adds, “TixSuite was in development for six, nine months, and was designed with the express purpose of putting control back in the hands of those running events.”

Subscription

TixSuite’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sells subscriptions to venues, promoters, festivals, or events, its proprietary software, with three fixed monthly price levels depending on what they want.

It allows promoters to access 100 per cent of their ticketing revenue before the show rather than the traditional method of ticketing services holding the cash until afterwards, sometimes taking weeks and even months.

Because TixSuite doesn’t charge clients per-ticket fees, they, in turn, have the option of deciding whether not to charge their customers a booking fee or simply enough to cover their costs.

“Whatever they choose, all booking fees are theirs to keep – giving them control over all their customer revenue streams.

“Those that choose to charge fees, venues and promoters can communicate to ticket buyers exactly what that fee will be used for – whether that be for venue upgrades, collecting donations for charity, or anything in between.”

Clients’ first event is free for up to 1,000 ticket sales sold within 90 days of going on sale.

Other features are events can put their brand on tickets, sell tickets from their own websites as well as Eventfinda’s, and use its email marketing tool to deal directly with customers.

There are automatic lay-by options, merchandising can be added as add-ons, and door lists can be downloaded. 

TixSuite uses Stripe, the global online payment processor and credit card processing platform for businesses. 

Stripe charges a flat fee of 30c for each transaction, regardless of how many tickets were sold in a transaction. A percentage of the total sale is also deducted: 1.75% for domestic cards and 3.5% for international ones.  

It accepts cards, wallets, currencies, bank debits and transfers, cash-based vouchers, bank redirects and buy now, pay later.

Event Discovery

Eventfinda was founded in 2006 focussing on events discovery. It saw the need for a well-designed ticketing system that put the needs of venues, promoters, and consumers on an equal footing. 

In 2009, it launched a ticketing platform, continuing with events discovery, venue database and audience engagement. 

According to its website, it has issued almost 10 million tix to over 150,000 events in Australia and New Zealand. Ticket sales on both sides of the Tasman are over NZ$100 million (AU$91.3 million).

McGlinn, who started Eventfinda with the late Michael Turner, graduated from the University of Auckland with degrees in commerce and computer science. He set up a network of 850 NZ web developers.

Gathering listings for events listings was a mammoth job because no such service existed in NZ. He and Turner would take data from street posters and TV ads and manually enter it into their database. 

It took some time before promoters and venues twigged they would benefit if they started providing the data themselves.

Eventfinda had 750,000 visits to its website each month and had 250,000 on its email list. An Austrian company licensed its software and made its initial push into the SE Asia market through Singapore.

The two founders' entry into the Australian market made a bigger splash than they expected. Within the first two weeks, it had 4,000 events listed and 2,000 visitors a day.

In 2023, Ibis World reported that Australia had 21 ticketing businesses, which also covered sports and theatre. Its numbers on online event ticket sales put revenue at $413.8 million and employing 1305 employees whose wages came to $71.2 million.

It listed the three biggest online companies as TEG’s Ticketek, which generated revenue of $255.8 million last year, Live Nation’s Ticketmaster with a tally of $59.9 million, and Eventfinda Australia at $12.4 million.

Statista forecast the Australian event tickets market would grow by 4.4 per cent in 2024 to reach US1.6 billion (AU$2.42 billion) in revenue. The music event component would only be worth US $0.72 billion (AU$1 billion). The American events market, by comparison, will be generating revenue of $36.2 billion (AU$54.9 billion) this year.

An annual growth rate of 1.8 per cent would see the Australian event sector hit US$1.73 billion (AU$2.62 billion) in 2028 when the number of users was predicted to be 6.9 million.