I just got off the phone with Ahmed Nimale, CEO and Co-Founder of KYD Labs. Know him? I doubt it. And neither did I, until I hosted a panel about ticketing at Canadian Music Week.

Ticketing. It’s a game few understand, and few want to understand. And ultimately this panel wasn’t about solving the ticketing problems everybody is concerned with, i.e. the fees, availability, prices, bots…but independent ticketing companies trying to build a business.

I’ve lived through this, for decades. Anybody who gains real traction is ultimately sold to one of the big kahunas, akin to how if you compete with Amazon and are any good, they buy you. It’s just not that interesting to me, because we don’t live in a vacuum. I remember meeting the majordomo of Songkick, back in the early days, I asked him how he was gong to make money. It was simple, he told me he was going to sell tickets. SELL TICKETS? Yes, the platform was a way to reach new customers and they could sell tickets. And how much would they pay Ticketmaster, et al, for these tickets? NOTHING! These outlets would be glad to work with Songkick, because of its ability to reach potential customers. This was a complete misunderstanding of the business, all the money is in selling the tickets, these companies are not just going to cough up inventory. And they didn’t.

What you’ve got is techies who see a problem and don’t understand the business. Like all those music distribution sites that launched back at the turn of the century. They just could not fathom that they needed licenses from the rights holders, on the rights holders’ terms. Didn’t matter how good the idea was, the question was how good was it for the company? Was it going to undercut its traditional business, was it going to generate revenue, was there going to be a large enough guarantee? Eventually the problem was solved by Daniel Ek, years after the problem arose, and despite all the complaints about Ek and Spotify, he dedicated untold time and money in making it happen. He might fly private now, but he didn’t back then. That’s what people don’t understand, one person can make a difference, change the world, but not in a vacuum. Ek realized he needed licenses to make it work, that was the hardest part, the tech was much easier.

So what I ended up doing on this CMW panel was asking about the specific companies, drilling down into the specifics. How much money was raised, how much spent. Those are the important details when starting a business, an idea is just the kernel, you need to make it pop. And you’ve got to be able to answer all these questions, And I don’t want to hear that your company is bootstrapped, because you don’t have enough money to make a difference, even if you may be able to make a small profit. I want someone dynamic, alive, who can answer all the questions.

And that was Ahmed Nimale. A man with experience in ticketing. He was impressive, and in reviewing my panel with others, I mentioned him, pointed him out.

And then he wanted to talk.

I never want to talk. Because you want to sell and I’m not buying. But I found this guy impressive, so I ended up with a free moment today and I decided to call, weeks after he first asked me to.

And he talked about TikTok marketing. THAT I’m interested in.

Did you catch that article the other day how they can’t prove the deleterious effects of TikTok?

“Everyone Says Social Media Is Bad for Teens. Proving It Is Another Thing. – Parents, scientists and the surgeon general are worried. But there isn’t even a shared definition of what social media is.”: https://tinyurl.com/2p9af9b8

It’s just like they used to say about rock and roll, the little girls understand. And the oldsters do not.

So Ahmed told me he had TikTok ticket marketing down.

So I asked him to tell me the story.

Well, he’d gone through a huge number of influencers, and found ones with reach that were in the proper wheelhouse. And he asked them how much they’d charge to create a clip, and in this example, the girls said $200. This is what he got:

https://tinyurl.com/4ynfzrxx

For his $200, Ahmed got in excess of 10,000 impressions.

And then he went to TikTok and bought ads, to put on these clips.

Now in this case, the end result was a wash, as much as he put in for ads is what he got back in ticket sales.

He said for $100, TikTok delivered 10,000 impressions. But it could be more, because the clip itself might go viral. There might end up being 100,000 impressions.

And then Ahmed told me he purchased a site. Well, a name. Well, a TikTokker. Ahmed combed the music influencers, found one with reach who needed money to blow himself up, paid the influencer a five figure sum and put him on salary.

So, to put a clip promoting shows on this site, that he owns, costs Ahmed nothing. But in one day, ONE DAY, a clip posted yesterday got 98,000 views. And Ahmed finds ads on this site deliver a return of 3x.

So…

The hardest thing to do today is get noticed. The “Wall Street Journal” has a story today about Taylor Swift possibly doing a billion dollars on her tour. No one really knows, because she’s not releasing grosses, she’s waiting for it to be over, wanting the publicity of a large number. That’s Taylor. But what’s also true about Taylor is never has someone this big reached so few.

The only analogous tour to Swift’s “Eras” is the Rolling Stones’ 1972 U.S. tour. There was the same amount of publicity. But in that case, everybody under thirty knew Stones songs, everybody had heard “Satisfaction,” and more. So youth culture was apoplectic, talk about the impossibility of getting a ticket.

And today there are acts that sell boatloads of tickets, but their music is unknown to most.

“Morgan Wallen Enters Adele Territory With 14th Week at No. 1- The country singer’s latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” has now notched more weeks atop the Billboard chart than any album in more than a decade.”: https://tinyurl.com/mrx7epfw

Since Adele?? That album “21” with “Rolling in the Deep”? Never mind “Rumour Has It” and “Set Fire to the Rain”? Man, you couldn’t escape Adele back then, everybody had heard an Adele song. But has everybody heard a Morgan Wallen song? NO WAY!

And Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” just spent its twelfth week at #1 on the Hot 100. Twelve weeks is amazing, but even more amazing is how many people don’t know the track. Imagine this in the eighties, Whitney Houston had a bunch of tracks you couldn’t escape, never mind so many others. That paradigm is gone.

But the publicity isn’t.

Never mind the myopia.

You see what they tell us is omnipresent and reaches everybody does not. From “Succession” to “Eras”… The news is skewed. And in truth the impact of this is more serious in straight news as opposed to music, but…

The hardest thing to do is to reach people. And Ahmed Nimale has figured out a way.

He says it takes six touchpoints to get someone to buy. He focuses on TikTok and Instagram. And he’s built the technology to be able to track it all, where someone saw the info and what ad they used to buy tickets.

In other words, what works.

I asked Ahmed if anybody else was doing what he was.

And when I pushed him he said maybe a couple of people, but his advantage was nailing tracking and attribution. He’d made a science of it, he’d cracked the code.

Seems to me that Ahmed is on the bleeding edge.

Then again, I don’t talk to everybody.

Then again, everybody is so full of shi*t. They say they can do it and can’t. Sometimes they’ve never even tried, they’re just looking for the cash, then they’ll figure it out. Bluster is king.

Now Ahmed is using this marketing to aid the entities using his ticketing platform. And he says he can employ the same strategy/technology to sell other things, merch, etc.

But I’m not that interested in these independent ticketing companies. Because it’s an inherently limited market, all the big venues are sewn up. And the dirty little secret is the contracts almost never expire. The venue signed up for five years, but has spent the money/needs money in three. Sure, the ticketing company will give them more money, in exchange for more years.

But the marketing…

The active ticket buyer, the youth, and not only the youth, are on TikTok, which mainstream media abhors, which gets pissed on constantly. I won’t sell TikTok, but I will say that that’s where everybody is, and they don’t care what you think.

But TikTok is a black hole, run by algorithm, and everybody sees different stuff, making it look too opaque to tackle.

But Ahmed says he’s figured out a way.

Pretty interesting to me.