Ticketless subscription platform FanRally officially went live last month and is aiming to change the game when it comes to how fans reserve seats for events. FanRally allows teams to sell ticketless subscriptions, similar to streaming service subscriptions, instead of season ticket packages or tickets to individual games. On the consumer side, fans who pay for memberships are able to reserve their seats for upcoming events at no additional cost instead of purchasing tickets.
The Milwaukee Brewers, the University of South Carolina, and Stanford University are the first organizations to use FanRally’s member-exclusive seat reservation privileges rather than tickets for events, but the software is also available for music artists and other event venues.
FanRally co-founder and CEO Chris Giles explains that the idea for the company stemmed from a similar program that the Oakland A’s began offering in 2018 when he was working there as COO. “We realized that modern consumers were not buying season tickets and that the vast majority of them were building relationships with unaffiliated resale marketplaces rather than their favorite teams,” he says.
This dynamic makes it difficult for teams to gather data on and build loyalty among their consumers. “With an entire generation of people opting for subscription access over traditional ownership in every facet of their life, we knew we needed a fundamentally new approach, one that resonated with modern consumers and incentivized them to establish direct relationships with their team,” says Giles.
The Oakland A’s solution was called A’s Access, which allowed the team to sell the non-transferable privilege to attend games instead of “offering a bundle of tickets for the same experience over and over.” It also included membership benefits such as discounts on food and refreshments at the stadium. “Effectively, we introduced the elements of flexibility and true member exclusivity into the membership equation and the results were astounding,” explains Giles.
A’s Access was incredibly successful, adding over 10,000 new members in the year in debuted. As the program began to garner attention from other sports executives, Giles and his team knew that “it wouldn’t be long before all teams would be selling subscription memberships and that there would be a massive need for a scalable software platform to support this new ticketless approach.”
That was the beginning of FanRally, as Giles left the A’s in 2020 to co-found the company and pursue his vision of creating the world's first ticketless membership platform, based on the premise that the member experience must be significantly differentiated from that of a single ticket buyer. “That vision is impossible to achieve with ticket bundles,” he notes, “since every member benefit is tied to the ticket, and the underlying tickets are fully transferable.”
With FanRally, seat reservation privileges are exclusive to the member and cannot be transferred or sold. Members pay a monthly subscription fee and can then reserve seats directly on their phones whenever they want to attend a game or event — they’re not tied to a certain number of seats or a specific seat location as with season tickets. In addition, “the non-transferable privilege to attend every game of the season, typically costs the consumer between 40 - 60% of a season ticket in a similar seating zone,” says Giles.
Most events can be reserved at no additional cost, although some of the most popular events include a reservation fee — the way some streaming platforms will charge for new releases — which would still typically be a small fraction of the ticket price. Fans can use the app to upgrade their seats and invite other members to sit with them, and FanRally also allows partners to offer guest passes to members so that they can reserve adjacent seats for non-members.
“We ensure that each member has equitable access to reservations by capping the number of simultaneous reservations that each member can hold,” says Giles. “We understand that live events are the driving force of the experience economy, and we are happy to provide teams and fans with a turnkey solution to modernize and simplify their approach.”
When it comes to live music, FanRally enables artists to sell memberships directly to their fans for access to tour dates, which helps fans feel more connected to the artist and puts more revenue in the hands of artists over scalpers and third-party sellers. By using FanRally, partners can provide a more personalized experience to members — while tickets are anonymous, every reservation and other activity on FanRally is connected to the member’s identity, just like on a streaming platform.
“Based on current consumption trends, we expect industry-wide subscription membership revenue to surpass season ticket revenue within the next 5 years and completely replace it within 10,” says Giles. “I’ve yet to talk to a team executive that is having any real success selling ticket bundles to the modern consumer. Content owners in every industry — media, software, fitness, and many more are offering direct to consumer subscriptions, and live events are next.”