Lyte is still offline: Latest Updates and Impact on Ticketing
UPDATED: Ticketing company Lyte shut down suddenly late last week. Now Lyte is seeking a buyer as polarizing founder Ant Taylor, former employees, and affected promoters and fans offer a clearer picture of the closer despite $53 million in funding.
Be sure to read the comment section below for more. We have not confirmed identity of the authors.
Fallout
“this really messed up my small local festival”
Multiple sources tell Hypebot that they are unable to access their ticket inventory or other sections of the site. Michigan’s Big Fam Festival added a Comment to our original post typical of what others are saying off the record: “This really messed up my small local festival, I really hope they give me access back.”
Just a week ago Lyte was still promoting its group ticket buying solution Lyte Groups.
$53 Million Raised
From a seed round in 2016 to series B round in January 2021, Lyte had raised $53 million in 5 rounds.
But as with all startups who try to “fix” ticketing, Lyte’s efforts were dwarfed by Ticketmaster, Axs, StubHub and handful of powerful and deep pocketed primary and secondary ticketers.
Smelled this from miles away
No doubt. The only surprise is that it took this long.
This really messed up my small local festival, I really hope they give me access back
Same here, BIG FAM you’re not alone!! We’re in the same boat!
Thanks for sharing
If you or your company has been affected by the Lyte shutdown. or have any related info, we want to hear from you. Comment here or reach out directly.
I haven’t received my refund for 2 tickets ($880)
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Yes you keep deleting mine.
We are affected by it. LYTE still owe us the 20% holdback from our ticketsales. Not a single email or any type of communication from their side. Every employee that we reach just says “i no longer work at LYTE, please refer to Lisa the CFO”
I worked for this shit company. Ant is delusional and did not know what he was doing.
Ant Taylor: Putting the lies in Lyte since 2014! Let’s all make sure we tell our stories about this joker and his board of enablers to anyone who will listen – save the next poor sucker they’re trying to swindle in this sale!
Or he knew EXACTLY what he was doing all along. Which is worse?
My experience was a little different. I worked for this shit company, too. Ant was delusional but knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way.
Let’s hope everyone who witnessed Taylor’s behavior or uncovered his lies speak out. Even if the press will not print our truths because the evidence is too hard to get at, we all know who he is and what he’s done personally and professionally, right?
None of the clients are getting paid. Ask anyone who has seen the sales offering making the rounds. Anyone remotely related to ticketing has received it.
The company has settled with multiple woman over the years regarding Ant Taylor’s physical and emotional abuse. This included his co-founder, employees and others. The board signed off on settlements. There are multiple people who claim to have done hard drugs with him and who know he solicited sex workers while traveling on company business
Lyte’s dynamic pricing engine is not real. It is manually operated and manipulated by one employee named Karina Briooukhova, a former professional ticket scalper who has been with Lyte since the beginning. The rest of the company is made to believe it is “real”. Pricing is optimized for Lyte’s margin, nothing else
Lyte’s ticket exchange is used by its largest clients to scalp their own tickets. The overwhelming number of tickets transacted are not between fans. No. Karina inflates the prices on the waitlists, customers put down credit cards to reserve tickets at those prices, and the tickets are sourced directly from the promoters without fans knowing. The biggest users of the platform in this way are Live Nation-owned BottleRock Festival (Dave Graham) and Baja Beach Fest (Chris Den Uijl). Both have done this for multiple years, as did AEG’s Coachella and StageCoach festivals (Melissa Ormand). BottleRock’s management team also were investors in Lyte. Millions of dollars are grossed this way, usually with the events in question marketing themselves as ‘sold out’ when in actuality they are taking tickets off the market to scalp through Lyte
Multiple people who have spoken with Ant Taylor say he is trying to raise money to buy the company back during the liquidation process. Once the board told him they were shutting it down, he resigned so he could position himself as separate from that decision in the marketplace and blame the board when clients are not paid. The terms of the liquidation call for the unsecured creditors (clients) to not be paid, so his plan is to buy the company back and rebuild it with no debt. Two of the people (Gerard Mitchell and Chandler Abbott) who have stayed on to assist the liquidator are close to Ant and have told people they agreed to stay on so they can help him have an inside track on the process. Ant claims that Live Nation or Michael Rapino personally are going to invest in the new company and replace Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing engine with Lyte
The solicitation package that has gone out to potential buyers has many misleading statements, including claims about the health of the business, employee status, client and contract status, business health KPIs. It misrepresents specific clients that no longer have contracts with Lyte, including Burning Man and the prestigious 9:30 Club
Sports Illustrated Ticketing, Cash or Trade, Seated, AEG’s AXS, Live Nation’s Front Gate Tickets, the NFL and many others have received the solicitation package
One of the investors and board members, Rob Goldberg, arranged for Ant to receive personal loans from the company and colluded with him to manipulate other investors and board members and to obscure financial information which might have impacted their investment decisions. They also pressured Lyte finance team members (which hear total turnover every year) to draft inaccurate financial reports for the board, employees ans investors. Lyte intentionally avoided strategic investors with domain expertise and sought investors with little ability to independently verify their claims about the market Lyte operated in. Investors and board members with strong points of view and who asked questions were treated as adversaries
This is a great thread on the situation: https://x.com/TheFestiveOwl/status/1836441559585198569
If you look up the definition of ‘Unethical’ you should see the name Antony Taylor right next to it. He liked to play by his rules, he did everything behind his client’s backs and if caught, would kiss ass and ask for forgiveness later. He can be a very charming person so he got away with a lot.
As mentioned by another comment, Ant had us begging clients for their “late release” tickets for sold out shows so that we could professionally scalp it for them. To be fair, a lot of Lyte’s clients were innocent in this, they just wanted to offload some extra tickets to an existing waitlist without realizing how much Lyte was manipulating the dynamic pricing.
Have you heard of ticket splitting? This is another way Ant was able to have higher margins. I’ll use simple numbers for this example. XXX Festival is a 3-day event. a 3-day ticket sells for $300. Single day tickets sell for $125. Lyte will take a 3-day return for $300 then split that into a Friday, Saturday, & Sunday ticket. Lyte then sells it for more than what the $125 single day ticket is worth. TLDR; buy back a 3-day ticket for $300 and resell it as single days for $375+.
When it came to the waitlist, Lyte manually picked and chose who they wanted to fulfill first. Since the prices were “dynamic” some customers made a request for a ticket at a higher price as demand would increase. Lyte will choose to fulfill the requests that were at a higher price and slowly fulfill the lower priced requests that were closer to the front of the line. Ant was in full control of the fan’s experience. Doesn’t sound like the magical ticketing experience you wanted to give the fans, huh Ant?