The Concert Ticket Fix: A Conversation with Dusty Rich

There are several problems with ticketing for live music, but two brothers claim they have a solution to at least one of them: price gouging.

In my experience, ticketing for live music is broken. Beyond the exorbitant fees charged by Ticketmaster and the like, you have bots and brokers buying up hundreds of tickets and immediately listing them on marketplaces like StubHub for multiples of the original price. Because of this, I’m always intrigued when someone claims they have a fix for any of the problems in this long chain of issues.

Enter Dusty Rich. Dusty and his brother Brando founded CashorTrade in 2009 in an attempt to make reselling tickets for jam bands a less painful experience. The premise was simple. You can only list your tickets at face value. In the years since, they’ve expanded into other genres while remaining a staple in the jam band community. For over an hour, Dusty and I spoke about the biggest problems in ticket reselling, how a platform can make money with the face value mentality, and why every live performer is indebted to a culture pioneered by jam bands.

A Conversation with Dusty Rich

CashorTrade is part of an industry of ticket marketplaces, including StubHub and VividSeats, but you make it clear that your company is very different from those other websites. Can you lay out what the key differences are?

With the digital revolution in ticketing, fans were being cut out. You had bots buying up tickets and listing them for artificially high prices. Our model at CashorTrade is more about building community and the “face value movement” that demands that fans have a safe transparent marketplace to resell tickets at face value with optional fees.

How can you be sure that sellers are really selling at face value?

Users can flag if something is listed above face value. If something is flagged a certain number of times, the ticket is automatically removed from CashorTrade. We also have some automatic checks in place. In fact, we are now integrating with primary ticketing platforms to crosscheck CashorTrade prices with the initial price from the primary brokers.

What prevents people who buy tickets with bots from listing them on CashorTrade?

We have a series of checks on accounts. We look at purchase history, IP address, and some more sophisticated metrics. If something gets flagged as a possible bot, our support department will look into it.

It’s interesting because there’s not really an incentive for resellers to fix this problem. They make money from exorbitant pricing.

That’s true. That model always comes at the expense of fans and artists.

Dusty Rich [left] and Brando Rich, the brothers behind CashorTrade

Let’s talk about your revenue model. From what I can see, you either charge the buyer a 10% fee or you have a subscription tier that gives users no seller fees, along with some additional perks. Is CashorTrade mostly powered by subscriber revenue or seller fee revenue?

A bit of both. We started CashorTrade as a “freemium” model. It is the only platform free to sell your tickets, capping prices at face value.  Buyers purchasing the face value ticket have an optional 10% platform contribution.  I say optional because we are the only resale app offering a subscription where $4 per month waives the contribution and includes perks like instant notifications and other features.

CashorTrade is also unique because we act like a banking service. We facilitate the transactions and will put the purchase money in escrow. Once we can assure the transaction has gone smoothly, we deploy funds to the seller’s account.

That ticket insurance concept is interesting. Is CashorTrade providing the insurance or is it an outside firm underwriting the insurance?

At the moment, we provide that service ourselves. As we scale, we are looking to work with a bigger insurance company.

Fans in search of buying and selling tickets to see Goose on CashOrTrade

The live event space has been plagued by many issues over the last few years. What do you think are the biggest issues right now?

One thing I don’t think people talk about enough is the nonrefundable nature of tickets. If you bought an expensive television, there is likely some period where you could return it. That’s not the case with tickets. If you want to offload a ticket you’ve purchased, you have to list it in one of those marketplaces where the fees can be ridiculous for both buyers and sellers.

But this problem runs even deeper. Imagine you buy a ticket, and you can’t go to the show. You aren’t able to resell it, so the ticket goes unused. Not only are you losing out but so is the artist. They miss out on all of the other revenue you might generate from being in the venue. Plus, in the case where you have brokers buying tons of tickets, the artists don’t even benefit from a resale. In the end, you have artists and fans losing, probably the two groups you least want to lose. CashorTrade wants to help get tickets in the hands of real fans.

What’s been the biggest difficulty in getting the industry to buy into this face value concept?