Music discovery and ticketing app Dice has announced it is expanding to the US.
The company has already moved into Los Angeles and California, with plans to expand around the rest of the country. Dice already had shows with Sam Smith, Khalid and Matthew Dear, as well as Vevo’s Halloween event in San Francisco.
Phil Hutcheon, CEO and founder of Dice, said “We’re focused on a younger demographic that’s fed up with how ticketing is. They’re disengaging and we need to be careful because live music is in competition with Netflix. With bars. With eating out. And if you keep screwing over fans they won’t come back. Dice is the ethical platform that fans trust to get tickets. We get fans in, keep scalpers out, and we have ambitious plans to roll out across the US in the coming months.”
Since launching in the UK in September 2014, Dice has expanded its platform throughout the UK, offering fans tickets gigs, clubs and festivals with no booking fees. It won Best Ticket Company at the 2016 Music Week Awards and was included in Apple’s App Store Apps of the Year in 2015.
Tickets are purchased within the app and exist on the user’s smartphone. Each listing displays a selection of recommended shows at the bottom of the event description, generated by a mix of algorithms and human-powered curation.
All tickets sold are sourced directly from artists, promoters and venues, with over 700 artists having sold their tickets on the platform, including Taylor Swift, Disclosure, Jamie xx, George Ezra, Skepta, Jack White, Four Tet, Justin Bieber, Alabama Shakes and Years & Years. Tickets can be purchased, refunded and transferred in just a few taps.
Dice handled ticket sales for Sam Smith's War Child charity gig in London earlier this month, offering fans an exclusive chance to enter a ballot to purchase tickets for a donation of £25. The decision to sell the tickets via Dice guaranteed they couldn't be resold on the secondary ticketing market.
Russ Tannen, head of music at Dice, said “The US launch follows a year where Dice has released our world-first Refunds feature, signed up new venues including London’s Islington Assembly Hall, and kept the scalpers out of Sam Smith’s intimate comeback shows.”
