Ticketing giant Ticketmaster has announced a partnership with the metal band Avenged Sevenfold to launch a new feature that allows artists to offer special access to concert and event tickets for owners of the band’s Deathbats Club NFTs.
The Deathbats Club collection consists of 10,000 unique NFTs that act like the band’s club membership cards. Even with 10,000 NFTs, the Deathbats Club is a relatively small club considering the global popularity of the band, which has sold over 8 million albums and performs for thousands of fans in arena-sized venues like Madison Square Garden. As such, the demand for Deathbats Club NFTs is quite high. According to data from NFTgo, the floor price of Deathbats has more than doubled over the last month.
Avenged Sevenfold is just the first for a new feature that Ticketmaster is intending to rollout for all artists, whereby Ticketmaster will ‘token-gate’ ticket sales and offer up special access to concerts and events for eligible NFT owners. In Avenged Sevenfold’s case, owners of a Deathbat were offered early access to purchase tickets for the band’s June concerts in New York and Los Angeles.
Ticketmaster’s new feature was developed in partnership with Bitflips, the Web3 team behind the Deathbats Club NFT collection. The token-gating function is currently compatible with NFTs minted on the Ethereum blockchain and stored in dApp wallets, such as MetaMask. Ticketmaster has said that its token-gating capabilities are based on how artists want to connect their community, and are a blank slate for the artist to decide. The feature is now available to any artist with their own NFT collection or that has partnered with an NFT community.
There have been suggestions that NFTs will likely have a significant impact on the ticketing industry. In addition to similar initiatives to Ticketmaster’s ticket-gating function, NFTs could provide a more secure and transparent ticketing system for events. With NFTs, event organisers can issue unique tickets that are verifiable, traceable, and secure. This could prevent ticket duplication and counterfeiting, reducing fraud and ticket scalping. The intersection between NFTs and ticketing in the near future will be an interesting showcase of the many practical applications of blockchain technology.