Ticketfly's Director of Sales Jeff White is pictured with Roxy Theatre owner Nic Adler at a party inside On The Rox in West Hollywood, Calif.
Dusk has fallen on one of Ticketmaster’s longest-held ticketing contracts on the Sunset Strip.
After over 35 years together, The Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, Calif., is ending its contract with the ticketing giant for a new multiyear deal with San Francisco-firm Ticketfly. Roxy Theatre owner Nic Adler said his unhappiness with the pace of technological change at Ticketmaster was the main reason he left the company.
“We were looking more for a technology partner than a ticketing company,” explained Adler, whose father Lou Adler first inked the deal with Ticketmaster predecessor Ticketron in the 1970s. When Ticketmaster took over Ticketron in the 1980s, Adler's contract was also taken over and together the two sold millions of dollars worth of tickets.
The takeover came during the heyday of the famed Sunset Strip when acts like Neil Young and Genesis would play the 500-capacity club. But slowly the glitz and glamour of the Sunset Strip’s party scene began to fade and, by the early 2000s, Nic had taken over the club from his father and began to reinvent the Roxy’s image.
He struck social media gold in the mid-2000s as an early adopter on sites like Twitter and Facebook, building up huge followings online and eventually transforming the Sunset Strip into a new hub for the convergence of music and technology.
In recent years, The Roxy had been using Ticketmaster-owned Ticketweb — a platform created by Ticketfly President Andrew Dreskin and sold to Ticketmaster in 2000. With Adler's contract set to expire in 2013, Adler said he began looking at other systems and after a longtime courtship, opted to sign with Ticketfly.
“We’re a 40-year-old business that is all about loyalty and this wasn’t something I took lightly,” he said.
Adler said a key component of his decision was Ticketfly’s rollout of the Fanbase analytics tool, which couples Facebook data with ticket sales information, linking the datasets in a way that hadn't been available in the past.
For Ticketfly, the new signing brings a high profile club owner into the fold. Adler’s speaker services at industry conferences have been in high demand and he has been a returning panelist for South by Southwest, Aspen Live and the Event & Arena Marketing Conference, among dozens of other conferences.
“Nic represents the new guard and he’s building quite a business around social media,” explained Dreskin. “It’s great to be in business with a venue with this much history, but also represents the best of the music industry going forward.”
The collaboration between the two doesn’t include ticketing for the Sunset Strip Music Festival, which currently uses Eventbrite. There are, however, opportunities for collaboration between Ticketfly and Adler Integrated, the digital marketing and social media solutions company helmed by Adler.
“We’re exploring working together,” said Dreskin. “We have a large professional services and marketing services group that powers over 400 promoter websites and pours gasoline on various events. We think there is an opportunity to introduce Adler Integrated to a number of our clients.”
And for Adler, he hopes the partnership means a chance to give feedback on the technological direction of the Ticketfly platform and a chance to have his voice heard by the development team.
“We like to get in there and break things,” he joked, later adding, “We know we can now make our voice heard. We’re the kind of group that likes to give a ton of feedback.”
Interviewed for this article: Nic Adler, (310) 278-9457; Andrew Dreskin, (877) 435-9849