“As a manager and as a fan, I’ve never bought a ticket on the secondary market. I don’t agree with it.” Dice CEO Phil Hutcheon.
Startup live music discovery and mobile ticket seller Dice has only one thing in mind: getting you to the best gigs, clubs, and even festivals. What’s the difference, you ask, between Dice and other ticket-selling companies? Why should we pay attention to this startup?
The answer: Dice, unlike other companies, won’t charge you any booking fees to reserve your tickets nor will it pressure artists into selling their tickets even cheaper, causing them to lose substantial profits.
But wait a minute, you say. How can a ticket-selling company do this and still be profitable? That’s even easier to answer. According to TechCrunch, the London-based ticket selling startup has recently scored around $6 million in its Series A funding round back in June, bringing its total fundraising to around $10 million. It also helps to have had the Series A funding round led by Evolution Equity Partners, which invests in promising growth stage tech companies in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. Its list of realized companies and growing companies has proven to be very impressive, with millions of dollars having been invested in now-strong companies.
With this funding, Dice has been able to increase its current employee list to 42, “including a music and data science team focused on building machine learning algorithms to help users figure out what their next big night out should be.” Dice is also planning on making the data it’s collecting through these algorithms helpful for promoters “to help them figure out when and where to put on a gig, and even what to charge.”
Dice first launched in September 2014 as a guide for upcoming concerts in London, selling tickets for these concerts without any booking fees at all and storing the ticket on your app so you could scan it on the door. According to Dice’s About page, they’ve worked with Adele, Taylor Swift, Disclosure, and Skepta, along with promising new artists like Whitney, The Big Moon, SG Lewis, and Liss.
So far, they’ve been able to have over 700 artists sell tickets on Dice in around 1,400 UK gigs.
Dice sticks to the philosophy that tickets should be made available directly to the concertgoer, without them having to buy them at inflated prices. Sticking to this philosophy, all ticket sales are done straight through the app in order to avoid having bots “that scalp ticketing websites and hoover up stock to sell on at exploitative prices.” Dice CEO, co-founder and veteran music manager Phil Hutcheon told The Guardian two years ago,
“We’re empowering artists to control ticketing. As a manager and as a fan, I’ve never bought a ticket on the secondary market. I don’t agree with it. Dice is a piece of technology that means the tickets will never make it there.”
Hutcheon also told TechCrunch that they’re looking to expand outside of just ticket sales, with possible entries into the sports and theatre industry. We’ll have to wait and see how Dice does with this increase in funding, and if it’ll be able to successfully expand into other territories.