Industry News

2022 in review – May

Featured image credit: Nat Callaghan on Unsplash

English Premier League club Manchester United kicked off the month of May with an overhaul of its season ticket policies. The move was made to give fans more choice, with the 2022-23 season allowing season ticket-holders to opt in or out of each cup competition. The changes were brought in following the consultation with Manchester United Fans’ Advisory Board (FAB) and Fans’ Forum.

ABBA returned in May, albeit in avatar form, at the debut of the ABBA Voyage show in London. The concert had been in the planning since 2016 and uses technology to recreate ABBA in their prime in the 1970s, performing their greatest hits. To create their avatars and the concert, the band members performed in motion capture suits across five weeks, with 160 cameras focused on scanning body movements and facial expressions.

Elsewhere, secondary ticketing platform Viagogo lost its appeal against a prior court decision in Australia. The company was ordered to pay a A$7m (£3.8m/$4.7m/ €4.4m) fine for misleading customers when it resold concert and sports tickets five years ago. The Full Court of the Federal Court dismissed Viagogo’s appeal of a 2019 decision which found that the company had misled consumers. The court ordered that the “appeal is dismissed with costs”.

Boutique ticketing solution XTIXS partnered with GET Protocol to announce a decentralised finance (DeFi)-funded event featuring artist Lewis Capaldi in Reykjavik in August of this year.

Reykjavik Live was subsequently back up by a bespoke application of blockchain technologies including DeFi, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and GET Protocol’s utility token $GET.