Ticketmaster, for the uninitiated, is an American event ticket sales and distribution company based in Beverly Hills, California, operating in many countries around the world; founded in Phoenix (Arizona) in 1976 the company sold over 2019n of tickets with a turnover exceeding 10 billion dollars. We are therefore talking about one of the largest companies in the world in the ticketing sector, so the fact that Ticketmaster has decided to invest heavily in blockchain technology for managing the sales process is a decidedly important thing; besides, among the founders of the company there was also a computer scientist and evidently the drive towards technology and innovation is one of the main features of Ticketmaster. Speaking at the Elev8CON in Las Vegas yesterday, Sandy Khaund (vice president of Ticketmaster's blockchain products) expressed the company's vision for the ticketing market over the next five years; according to Khaund, in fact, tickets for concerts and events should be rethought as smart contracts in order to make them scalable and allow integration between the different platforms operating in the sector. More specifically, during his speech, Khaund stated that:

We want fans to get more value out of their tickets, while ensuring that tickets end up in the right hands. Blockchain is the only technology that can do it using smart contracts to digitally define the ticketing industry

In practice, according to the vision of Ticketmaster, the application of the blockchain to the ticket sales market should allow to put a stop to the phenomenon of bagarinaggio; when Khaund declares that through this technology it can be guaranteed that the tickets "end up in the right hands" is just hinting at the fact that recording ticket sales data on an immutable blockchain will make it much easier to find out who is buying more than they should and probably to stop purchases of tickets aimed at the sale destined for touts in the bud. Moreover, as stated by Khaund himself, Ticketmaster exploits a technology that is now over 40 years old, so it is time to innovate and the company has decided to do so by acquiring the Khaund company (Upgrade) and placing what was the CEO in an apical role in the new company organization chart; therefore, through Upgrade blockchain technology, Ticketmaster aims to transform tickets into interactive units, digitizing them and creating a system that works with encrypted barcodes to protect and improve the ticketing process. Khaund's intervention then continued by citing some concrete use cases, for example precisely to prevent the purchase of tickets to be resold at higher costs; the event in which this system was first tested involved a charity concert by Pearl Jam to manage which Ticketmaster printed two tickets for each available seat, one non-transferable and the second transferable only once. To better understand how this system works, think of the classic tickets for the riffs, they are blocks in which each sheet shows a number, a ticket goes to the buyer, the second remains attached to the matrix; in this case, therefore, the non-transferable ticket is sold to those who manage the resale, it is not transferable and gives it the right to sell the ticket itself, the one that then ends up to the public, which is transferable only once for which, a once sold by the issuer to the viewer it cannot be resold by the latter to third parties.