Case study · Ticketmaster

Designing how Ticketmaster prices live events

Every ticket Ticketmaster sells gets its price from a person. From 2019 to 2024, I designed the tools those people use, first by setting the direction for TM1 Pricing and later as design lead for Ticketmaster's entire pricing domain.

Role: Product Design Lead, Enterprise, Revenue and Demand
Tenures: Oct 2019 to Oct 2020
Mar 2022 to Sep 2024
Product: TM1 Pricing and the pricing domain of TM1, Ticketmaster's client platform
Partners: Product, engineering, data science and the pricers we built for

2.7x

growth in Ticketing operating income, 2021 to 2023

Live Nation 10-K (opens the source in a new tab)

$35.7B

in fee-bearing gross transaction value on Ticketmaster in 2023

Live Nation 10-K (opens the source in a new tab)

growth in VIP, Platinum and dynamically priced tickets, 2019 to 2022

Live Nation board materials (opens the source in a new tab)

30 of 30

top touring acts using dynamic pricing by June 2022

Live Nation board materials (opens the source in a new tab)

A pricer works for a venue, a promoter or a tour. Their job is to read demand and set the right price for every seat in the house, before an onsale and while it's happening, often for dozens of events at once.

I joined Ticketmaster's pricing team in 2019 as a senior product design and engineering specialist, and I returned in 2022 as product design lead for Enterprise, Revenue and Demand. In that second role my work went well beyond the screens. I managed the build of TM1 Pricing and the pricing domain around it, which meant shaping the business strategies with my product and engineering partners and then deciding how the product would actually deliver them.

What follows are the five decisions that mattered most. For each one I describe what pricers couldn't do before, what I designed and why, how it changed the way they worked, and the result the platform produced.

Platform result
Every business number on this page is public. The figures come from Live Nation's annual filings and from Live Nation board materials cited in a March 2026 U.S. Senate staff report. They describe the platform I designed for, and many teams contributed to them alongside my work.

My research
Results from the research I commissioned and ran with my product partners. Where I describe how the product changed pricers' day-to-day work, such as how long event setup took, that's my firsthand account, and I keep it in the story rather than presenting it as a headline number.

Where pricing started

In 2019, pricers couldn't see the house they were pricing

When I joined, pricers set prices through a command-line style interface. There was no seat map, no view across events, no price history and no early signal of how an onsale was going. Uploading a new set of prices could take up to an hour for a single event.

Ticketmaster's own guidance to artists holds that the first fifteen minutes of an onsale tell you most of what you need to know about demand. With an hour between a decision and its effect, pricers were always responding to a market that had already moved.

2019 to 2020Pricing team
I join in October 2019 and design the seat-level vision that becomes the roadmap.
Late 2020 to early 2022Away
I'm at Ahold Delhaize and Nike while the team builds the roadmap forward.
2022 to 2024Design lead
I return as design lead as pricing becomes its own domain, and lead it until September 2024.

Decision 01

Show pricers the whole house, seat by seat

Designed 2019 to 2020, built by the team through early 2022

Before
Pricers worked from rows of price codes in a text interface. Nothing showed where demand was building or what a seat had sold for.
What I designed
A seat-level model of the venue. Every seat carries its price, demand and history, and a section, a row or one seat takes the same gesture.
What changed
For the first time, pricers could see the house they were pricing, and act on one seat as easily as a whole section.

These years span the period when my roadmap was built and adopted, along with the return of live events after 2020. I credit the direction to my work and the build to the team that delivered it.

Live prototype · TM1 Pricing seat map prototype

My working prototype of the seat-level vision, built to show where the design had arrived by the end of 2024. It represents the direction I designed, and the shipped product may differ in places. Try selecting a section, a row and a single seat to see how one gesture covers all three.

The longer version

Before

Pricers worked from rows of price codes. To change the price of the best seats in a section, they had to know which codes mapped to those seats, edit them in a text interface and wait for the upload. Nothing showed them where demand was building or what a seat had sold for in the past.

What I designed

I designed a seat-level model of the venue in which every seat carries its current price, its demand and its sales history. Selecting a section, a row or a single seat uses the same gesture, so a pricer can move from a broad change to a precise one without switching modes.

I made that call because pricers already thought about a venue spatially. They talk about the lower bowl, the first ten rows and the aisle seats, and I wanted the tool to let them act the way they think.

My first quarter

I joined Ticketmaster's pricing team in October 2019, right as the busiest stretch of the year began. That quarter, Ticketing adjusted operating income grew 23% over the same quarter a year before, to $130.8M, in Ticketmaster's second-highest quarter ever for fee-bearing sales. Live Nation said it entered 2020 on track for tremendous growth, until live events stopped in mid-March. Its first-quarter results then carried refunds and cancellations on 7.2 million tickets, processed or set aside by the time it reported in May, so that quarter's drop says more about the shutdown than about the months before it.

My job in those months was to give pricers the tools to keep up. TM1 Pricing had no event search when I arrived, so I designed one, along with a filtering suite. Both were smart about what pricers were looking for, and pricers could save a set of filters and come back to it later. Search mattered most for Platinum, where pricers had to find the right events fast.

The platform couldn't support this model in 2019, so I turned it into the roadmap. I left in October 2020, and the team kept building against that plan while I was at other companies. The hands-on work in that period was theirs. When I came back in March 2022, we were at the end of that roadmap, and the direction I had set was the tool pricers were using every day.

What changed for pricers

For the first time, pricers could see the house they were pricing. They could find where demand was concentrating, act on a single seat as easily as an entire section, and check what a seat had done before deciding what it should do next.

Decision 02

Make market pricing something any ticket can carry

Whole house pricing, set in the 2019 direction and carried through the pricing domain from 2022

Before
Platinum and dynamic pricing were separate systems, so pricers had to decide which seats went where before the onsale began.
What I designed
Whole house pricing. Market pricing became a state any ticket can carry, running through one model that eventually replaced Pricemaster.
What changed
Any seat could move into market pricing, or back, from the same place. The question became demand, not which system a seat lived in.

In September 2022, Live Nation's board materials credited the TM Pricing Tool, the internal name for TM1 Pricing, with removing the old limits on adjusting prices to market conditions.

The longer version

Before

Responding to demand meant choosing a system ahead of time. Platinum was its own premium inventory, and dynamic pricing ran through a separate algorithm called Pricemaster. A pricer had to decide which seats belonged where before the onsale began, and moving a seat from one to the other was a project of its own.

What I designed

In the pricing domain I designed, market-based pricing became a state that any ticket can carry. We called the approach whole house pricing. We integrated Pricemaster into pricing through it and eventually replaced it, so every ticket now runs through one model.

The line between premium inventory and everything else came from how the older systems had been built. Pricers think of a house as one continuous range of demand, and I wanted the product to work the same way.

What changed for pricers

A pricer could move any seat into market pricing, or back to a fixed price, from the same place they managed the rest of the house. The decision became a question about demand for that seat, and the question of which system it lived in went away.

Decision 03

Bring every pricing flow into one domain

2022, as design lead

Before
Pricing was split across TM1 Events and several standalone platforms. In March 2022, two incidents blocked pricers during busy onsales.
What I designed
With product and engineering leadership, we gave pricing its own domain. I defined one set of concepts and one interaction language for every flow.
What changed
One tool where pricers used to have several, and pricing became the profit engine of TM1.

These are company-level results with many contributors, including the recovery of live events after the pandemic. They show the size and health of the platform the pricing domain was designed to run.

Ticketmaster (Live Nation Ticketing segment), trailing twelve months

First tenure: the seat-level vision, search, filters

My roadmap, built by the team

Design lead

12 months to Dec 2019 2019 revenue: $1.55B, up 1% on 2018. Q4 2019, my first quarter: $448.3M, up 2% on Q4 2018.
12 months to Mar 2020 Events ran into mid-April. Q1 2020 revenue was $284.3M as reported, after refunds and cancellations were taken back out of the quarter.
12 months to Jun 2020 Refunds outran sales: Q2 2020 revenue was negative, −$87.0M, reversing fees earned before the shutdown.

Cancellations and refunds
First tenure: the seat-level vision, search, filters
My roadmap, built by the team
Design lead

Ticketmaster revenue over the trailing twelve months, by quarter: 1.53 billion dollars in 2018 and 1.55 billion in 2019, falling to 188 million in 2020 as refunds outran sales, then 1.13 billion in 2021, 2.24 billion in 2022, 2.96 billion in 2023 and 2.99 billion in 2024.
12 months to Mar 2018	$1.41B
12 months to Jun 2018	$1.45B
12 months to Sep 2018	$1.47B
12 months to Dec 2018	$1.53B
12 months to Mar 2019	$1.49B
12 months to Jun 2019	$1.51B
12 months to Sep 2019	$1.53B
12 months to Dec 2019	$1.55B
12 months to Mar 2020	$1.49B
12 months to Jun 2020	$1.03B
12 months to Sep 2020	$626M
12 months to Dec 2020	$188M
12 months to Mar 2021	−$68M
12 months to Jun 2021	$263M
12 months to Sep 2021	$657M
12 months to Dec 2021	$1.13B
12 months to Mar 2022	$1.59B
12 months to Jun 2022	$1.92B
12 months to Sep 2022	$2.08B
12 months to Dec 2022	$2.24B
12 months to Mar 2023	$2.44B
12 months to Jun 2023	$2.57B
12 months to Sep 2023	$2.87B
12 months to Dec 2023	$2.96B
12 months to Mar 2024	$3.00B
12 months to Jun 2024	$3.03B
12 months to Sep 2024	$2.89B
12 months to Dec 2024	$2.99B

Ticketing adjusted operating income over the trailing twelve months, by quarter: 437 million dollars in 2018 (about 440 million through each 12 months of 2018, leaving out a one-time 110 million legal accrual from late 2017), rising to 482 million by the end of 2019, falling to a 482 million loss by March 2021 as live events shut down, then climbing to 828 million by the end of 2022 and 1.16 billion by mid-2024.
12 months to Mar 2018	$426M
12 months to Jun 2018	$439M
12 months to Sep 2018	$440M
12 months to Dec 2018	$437M
12 months to Mar 2019	$416M
12 months to Jun 2019	$437M
12 months to Sep 2019	$458M
12 months to Dec 2019	$482M
12 months to Mar 2020	$427M
12 months to Jun 2020	$99M
12 months to Sep 2020	−$170M
12 months to Dec 2020	−$375M
12 months to Mar 2021	−$482M
12 months to Jun 2021	−$179M
12 months to Sep 2021	$135M
12 months to Dec 2021	$420M
12 months to Mar 2022	$690M
12 months to Jun 2022	$821M
12 months to Sep 2022	$812M
12 months to Dec 2022	$828M
12 months to Mar 2023	$886M
12 months to Jun 2023	$943M
12 months to Sep 2023	$1.13B
12 months to Dec 2023	$1.14B
12 months to Mar 2024	$1.16B
12 months to Jun 2024	$1.16B
12 months to Sep 2024	$1.05B
12 months to Dec 2024	$1.12B

Platform result · Live Nation quarterly results (opens the source in a new tab)

The longer version

Before

When I returned in 2022, pricing lived inside TM1 Events and across several standalone pricing platforms, each with its own team and its own way of doing things. In March of that year, two major incidents blocked pricers from transacting during busy onsales, at exactly the moment they most needed to act.

What I designed

Together with product and engineering leadership, we moved pricing out of TM1 Events and into its own domain. It absorbed the pricing flows in Events and the standalone platforms, and their engineering teams joined ours.

My part was the domain model and the experience built on it. I defined one set of pricing concepts, one place to act on them and one interaction language that every pricing flow would share, so a pricer who learned one part of the product had learned all of it.

What changed for pricers

Pricers had one tool where they used to have several. We completed the consolidation later in 2022, and I believe it was what resolved the onsale incidents that had blocked pricers that March. With every flow in one place, pricing became the profit engine of TM1.

Decision 04

Give pricers the whole onsale at a glance

Pricing Dashboard, 2022 to 2024

Before
Pricers priced one event at a time, with no view across a tour, no early signal, and no way to price away from their desk.
What I designed
The Pricing Dashboard. Every event in one list, AI insights on where demand is moving, one change across many events, and pricing on a phone.
What changed
Setting up an event went from about an hour to about ten minutes. By 2024, more than 15,000 people priced events in the tool.

Live Nation doesn't report figures for the dashboard on its own, so these describe the onsales and pricing outcomes the dashboard was built to help pricers manage.

Live prototype · TM1 Pricing sales dashboard prototype

My working prototype of the Pricing Dashboard, reflecting the design direction rather than a capture of the live product. Filter the event list, then apply a price change across several events at once.

The longer version

Before

A pricer running a tour priced one event at a time. There was no way to see every event they managed together, no early signal of which ones were selling faster than expected, and no way to make a change across a tour in one move. If they stepped away from their desk during an onsale, they stepped away from pricing.

What I designed

I designed the Pricing Dashboard as the pricer's home base. It brings every event into one list with filtering, surfaces AI insights that flag where demand is moving, and lets a pricer apply one pricing change across many events at once. I also designed a mobile pricing experience, because the most important minutes of an onsale don't wait for someone to get back to a laptop.

The goal was to put the first fifteen minutes of every onsale in front of the pricer, with the tools to act on them in the same view.

What changed for pricers

Setting up an event went from about an hour to about ten minutes. Pricers could watch a whole tour at once, spot the events that needed attention before they became problems, and respond from wherever they were. By 2024, more than fifteen thousand people were pricing events in the tool.

Decision 05

Let the model price while the pricer keeps the view

Smart Pricer, 2023 to 2024

Before
The roadmap had Velocity Rules for pricers to automate their own work, while a validated model priced about 88% as well as an expert.
What I designed
I commissioned research before we committed. It led us to Smart Pricer, an AI pricing agent released in three phases so pricers could build trust.
What changed
Pricers could hand routine pricing to the model and still see every move it made.

The longer version

Before

Our roadmap included Velocity Rules, a manual automation feature that would let pricers write their own rules for how prices should move. At the same time, our data science team had validated a pricing model that performed about 88% as well as an expert pricer. We had to decide whether to keep building tools for pricers to automate their own work or to let the model do it for them.

What I designed

I commissioned research to answer that question before we committed. It led us away from Velocity Rules and toward an AI pricing agent called Smart Pricer, released in three phases so that pricers could build trust in it one step at a time.

What the research showed

Across nine stakeholder interviews and about 100 survey responses, pricers told us they weren't worried about automation itself. What they feared was losing sight of the decisions being made on their behalf. That became the principle for everything that followed.

I also ran an unmoderated Maze study in 2023 with about 97 pricing managers and venue operators, testing an early chat prototype that used a coded syntax such as "Section 10 Rows 2-5 + Price 10%." People could use it easily, but most of them didn't yet understand what it would do for them. My product partners and I read that as a gap in the value proposition, and we used it to change what we were building.

Three phases, each one earning trust for the next

Shipped 2024

One button

An MVP that lets a pricer hand an event to the model with a single action and see every change it makes.

Designed and roadmapped

Controls

A layer that lets pricers set goals and guardrails, so the model works inside limits they choose.

Designed and roadmapped

Conversation

A chat agent that explains each change it makes in language a pricer can question and act on.

The MVP shipped before I left in September 2024. I designed the controls layer and the conversational agent as the next two phases, and the team carried them forward after I left.

What changed for pricers

Pricers could hand routine pricing to a model that performs close to an expert while still seeing every move it made. Automation arrived as something they could inspect and grow into, which is exactly what the research told us they needed.

Reflection

What this work taught me

The thread running through all five decisions is that I designed the domain model and the experience together, so the concepts pricers act on are the same concepts the system runs on.

When those two match, a pricer can trust what they see. That trust is what let us bring every pricing flow into one place, and it's what made it possible to hand more of the work to a model without losing the people who depend on it.

I also learned how much a well-timed study can move a roadmap. The interviews and the Maze study gave my product partners and me a shared picture of what pricers needed, and that shared picture turned the pivot to Smart Pricer into a decision we made together.

Thank you to the pricers who gave their time to our research, the data science team whose model made Smart Pricer possible, my product and engineering partners across the pricing domain, and the team who carried the roadmap forward while I was away.

Sources

12 documents

Research figures come from the stakeholder interviews, survey and Maze study I commissioned and ran in 2023. Details of how the product changed pricers' work, including event setup time, the size of the user base and the model's performance against expert pricers, are my firsthand account.

Company-level results describe the platform I designed for and reflect the work of many teams. I worked on the pricing team from October 2019 to October 2020 and led design for the pricing domain from March 2022 to September 2024.

Jacob Irontree · TM1 Pricing case studyv2 · October 21, 2026