Simon Hennes

Takeaways

Why "you had to be there" became a business strategy.

Two weeks ago, a promoter planning an international residency told me: "Every person who leaves should feel like they witnessed something that will never happen again." I've been thinking about that ever since. Not because of the ambition. Because I keep hearing versions of the same sentence from promoters, venue operators, festival organizers, across completely different markets. And none of them are just talking about putting on a great show. They are talking about designing rooms where every person in the audience earned their way in. Fewer seats. Higher commitment. The show becomes the filter. For years, "you had to be there" was how fans described an experience they couldn't explain. Woodstock. Live Aid. That night your club got promoted and the whole city lost its mind. Today it is how operators design one. A Coldplay stadium show that turns 60,000 wristbands into something no screen can capture. The Eras Tour making every city feel like the only city that mattered. Not louder marketing. Not bigger venues. A fundamental rewiring of what makes live valuable. In my last Edition, I wrote about fandom becoming the core asset of live entertainment. The follow-up question I ask myself: if fandom is the asset, what is scarcity? The industry always treated scarcity as a byproduct. One night, one room, one moment. Now scarcity is the product.Engineered, protected, priced. And once you see it that way, the pattern is everywhere. A residency that only exists in one city. A phone-free room where the show lives only in memory. Dave Chappelle refusing to go on stage without every phone sealed in a Yondr pouch. Bob Dylan. Madonna. The show becomes something you can only describe, never replay. A hospitality tier designed so the fan next to you feels like they're at a different event entirely. A ticket that carries your name, your tier, your relationship with the organizer. None of these were coordinated. They emerged independently, across sports, music, festivals, comedy. Different problems, same instinct: make the room unrepeatable on purpose. And when the room is unrepeatable, willingness to pay follows. Fans are no longer comparing ticket prices to other shows. They are comparing to the cost of not being there. Call it the unrepeatable economy The playbook of the last two decades was scale reach, lower friction, digitize everything. What is happening now is the opposite. The technology is being used to make live less reproducible, not more. I obviously talk to a lot of event organizers. This is where it usually lands: if the room is designed to be unrepeatable, the system controlling access carries a weight it never carried before. Ticketing becomes the enforcement layer. If it can't protect the room, the model collapses. And the ticket itself is changing. It used to be a key. Show up, scan, enter. Now it is a credential. Named, verified, loaded with the buyer's history, their tier, the rules governing their access. The operator who rents that data out to an intermediary is handing away the most valuable asset in an unrepeatable economy: knowing who was in the room and how to reach them again. When an operator has spent months engineering the perfect room, every broken transfer, every hidden fee, every rejected wallet pass at the gate damages the experience they built. In an economy where the moment is the product, friction is brand damage. Every operator I talk to is wrestling with some version of this. Scarcity, once the ceiling, is now the point. And when scarcity is engineered end to end, the price of being there moves with it. Faster and further than most people in this industry realize. We built a small tool to make that visible. Ten iconic events. Six decades. One guess at a time. ⬇️ https://vivenu.com/price-of-being-there The tools of the last decades were buil for a different model. Whether they can serve the next one is worth a separate edition.

Takeaways

The growing value of “being there”.

In 2024, Gen Z topped every other generation in overall live event spend for the first time. In the U.S., they spent around $75 per month on live, roughly 23 percent more than the average music consumer. At the same time, studies show that 95 percent of Gen Z are interested in turning their online interests into real-life experiences. That combination signals a shift in what this generation actually considers valuable. What actually changed Every generation loves music. That never moved. What changed is the meaning attached to participation. For a long time, status signals were tied to ownership. What you had, kind of reflected who you were. That logic still exists, but it’s no longer dominant. For Gen Z, experiences carry more social weight than possessions, partly because they’re harder to replicate and partly because they exist in front of others. An item can be bought again. A moment cannot. When identity is shaped in public, moments that can be witnessed and referenced start to matter more than objects that simply sit somewhere. The mistake we keep making Many operators still talk about Gen Z as if they’re simply more digital. They are. But that’s not the point. Growing up in a digital environment changed what “valuable” feels like. If you grew up with infinite content, constant access, and endless choice, information stops being scarce. Presence doesn’t. Real access doesn’t. Belonging doesn’t. That’s why live is winning. Not because concerts improved, but because the definition of luxury shifted from ownership to participation. The psychology underneath it Look closer and a few drivers show up consistently. The first is identity signaling. Experiences aren’t just consumed, they’re used. Attending certain events communicates taste and belonging faster than almost anything you can buy. The second is social belonging as reward. The payoff of live moments isn’t limited to the stage. It comes from shared recognition around being there. In one large audience study, 84 percent of people attending interest-based events said they formed close friendships through them. That’s not a side effect. That’s part of the value. The third is how scarcity is perceived. It used to be treated mainly as a constraint. Now, when cultural relevance is involved, scarcity becomes a signal that a moment matters. Some events start behaving less like dates on a calendar and more like social reference points. You see it in how people talk about them afterward. If you haven't been there, you haven't been there. Lines like that don’t describe an event. They describe what it meant to be present. What social media actually changes It’s common to say social platforms drive hype. That’s true, but incomplete. What they really do is extend relevance. For many younger audiences, an event unfolds in three phases: anticipation before, visibility during, narrative after. And the audience keeps the story going long after the lights come on. Clips resurface. Conversations continue. Moments get referenced weeks later. That continuation doesn’t behave like marketing. It behaves like validation. When people share an experience voluntarily, they’re not promoting it. They’re integrating it into how they present themselves. That signal carries more credibility than anything paid. The implication for organizers If experiences function as status signals, ticketing is no longer “just” a system. It becomes brand infrastructure. Not branding in the marketing sense. Brand in the trust sense. Because when status runs through access, every interaction becomes part of the signal. Discovery, purchase, entry, and everything after collapse into one impression. Friction doesn’t register as technical. It registers as brand. A broken queue. Unclear pricing. Confusing policies. Resale chaos. A poor entry access. Those moments don’t just create refunds. They shape how the event is remembered. And if what Gen Z is buying is meaning, protecting the feeling of the moment becomes strategic. So the real question isn’t whether you’re selling tickets. It’s whether you’re designing experiences. One final thought Gen Z doesn’t evaluate events the way older models assumed. Attendance isn’t the metric they instinctively use. Meaning is. Which is why the real decision often isn’t about price or convenience. It’s simpler: Is this a moment I want to be part of, or something I could watch later? In a world defined by abundance, what remains scarce still carries the most value: Being there.

Takeaways

Why High Fixed Costs Give Event Organizers Big Margin Gains from Small Revenue Hikes.

Live events are often framed as a cost problem. Artist fees are rising. Production is expensive. Staffing gets harder every year. Venues, logistics, marketing. Everything feels heavier than it did a few years ago. So naturally, many conversations start with the same question: Where can we cut? But that question usually comes too late. In live events, the majority of costs are already decided long before the first ticket is sold. Once an event goes on sale, most of the economic structure is locked in. Artist contracts are signed. Venues are booked. Production is planned. Marketing baselines are committed. At that point, cost optimization still matters, but it rarely changes the outcome. Revenue decisions, however, can. This is where small changes start to have an outsized effect. A familiar example, just outside our industry Think about an airplane that is ready for takeoff. The aircraft is fueled. The crew is paid. The airport slot is secured. Whether there are 120 or 130 passengers on board barely changes the cost of that flight. But it changes profitability dramatically. Selling the last few seats at a slightly higher (or even lower) price does not just add revenue. Most of it flows directly into profit. Live events work in a very similar way. Why small revenue changes matter so much Once fixed costs are covered, additional revenue carries a high contribution margin. Variable costs do increase, but usually only marginally compared to the upside. That is why even small improvements in revenue strategy can reshape the economics of an event. Here is a simplified but realistic example: A 5 percent increase in revenue can lead to an 80 percent increase in EBITDA. Nothing about the show changed. No corners were cut. No quality was compromised. The difference came from revenue decisions. This is not about squeezing fans Revenue strategy is often misunderstood as simply charging more. In reality, it is about charging smarter. Airlines are not a high-margin business. But they have become highly sophisticated in managing demand through timing, access, pricing logic, and limited upgrades. Not to squeeze passengers, but to align price with willingness to pay. Hotels did the same. So did streaming platforms. So did theme parks. Live events are no different. Better pricing logic. Smarter add-ons. Clear value tiers. Timing that matches demand. Sponsorship models that align with the audience instead of interrupting it. These are not aggressive moves. They are thoughtful ones. Why revenue creates more leverage than cost cutting Once an event is live, the real upside comes from how demand is activated. Revenue growth does not have to come from higher base prices. It often comes from expanding the surface area around the ticket itself. Bundles that combine access with merchandise or perks. Flexible options that reduce purchase hesitation. Insurance and resale participation that keep buyers in the ecosystem. Upgrades that unlock value after the initial purchase. Retargeting fans who already showed intent instead of chasing new ones. Secondary market activity that remains owned rather than outsourced. None of these levers change the show. They change how value is captured around it. That is why revenue strategy creates disproportionate leverage once an event is on sale. One reshapes the outcome of an event. The other mainly protects it. The shift that changes how events make money Ticketing is the point where abstract demand turns into concrete choices. When to buy. What to buy. How much access is worth. Whether someone upgrades, adds on, or opts in. These decisions happen in seconds, and they rarely happen twice. Treating ticketing as a downstream system means accepting whatever outcome those moments produce. Treating it as a strategic layer means shaping them intentionally. That is the difference. Not between revenue and cost, but between leaving value on the table and designing for it upfront. Because in live events, what happens at the point of sale quietly determines whether an event merely breaks even or fundamentally outperforms.

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