TJ Chambers
Lyte closes, America is waiting, some new reading and award-winning music
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Last weekend there was a flurry questions about the fate of ticketing company Lyte, the official fan exchange and resale platform.
https://maintenance.lyteup.com/
On the 16th September, Ticketing Business News first reported that the company appeared to have suddenly and without any advance notice to clients, staff or suppliers, suspended its operations (https://www.theticketingbusiness.com/2024/09/16/lyte-website-remains-down-with-claims-it-has-ceased-trading/).
In a follow-up article on the 18th September (https://www.theticketingbusiness.com/2024/09/18/lyte-ceo-departed-weeks-before-company-shut-down/) it was further reported that Antony Taylor the CEO and Founder had left the company a few weeks previously following disagreements with ‘key figures at the top of the business over Lyte’s future direction’.
The San Francisco-headquartered company has not made any formal statement about its status but has apparently ceased activities and product development following several rounds of redundancies in recent times.
This isn’t the first ticketing company casualty of recent years – others include Festicket (which entered administration in August 2022 owing £22.5M with the Event Genius assets eventually being acquired by Lyte), Pollen (which owed £78.6M to creditors when it fell into administration in August 2022), and Brown Paper Tickets (which owed $6.75M before being acquired by Events.com in October 2022).
Further information will presumably follow.
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America is waiting …
Tony Knopp, CEO and Co-Founder, TicketManager (https://www.ticketmanager.com/) noted in his weekly Substack newsletter (https://tonyknopp.substack.com/) that whilst attending the SBJ Drive Conference (https://www.sbj-drive.com/2024/), ‘Ticketing companies are gearing up for a seismic shift’.
Apparently ‘Just about every ticketing company or PE I spoke with said the same thing this week: They think the DOJ may break up Live Nation or impose sanctions on them. And ticketing may shake up quite a bit. I heard it from primaries, secondaries, and consolidators. All are positioning themselves to pounce if something shakes loose.’
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Meanwhile, belatedly catching up with John Kay’s ‘The Corporation in the 21st Century. Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong’ (Profile Books) (https://profilebooks.com/work/the-corporation-in-the-twenty-first-century/), which has been included on the shortlist of the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year, 2024.
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Award winning …
And lastly, Sean Adams, Founder, Drowned In Sound (https://www.drownedinsound.org/) announced in his newsletter that the winner of the 2024 Neptune Music Prize (an alternate Mercury Prize) was ‘Chimet’ by Mining (https://mining.bandcamp.com/album/chimet).
So, there is your recommendation if ambient/electronic/experimental/moog is your thing.
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More next time.
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TJ_Chambers 