Why 24Tix Could be Your Hero, Just For One Day

For those of us concert freaks who get to a show at noon and wait for first entry, we probably know a ticket scam when we see one. Right? We’re the kind of folks who have only dreamt of times like Woodstock in ‘69, when the gates didn’t even exist (not that they didn’t try). When I sit down with Shon Taylor, founding partner of the local ticketing platform 24tix, we talk about the biggest joys of his work, and I relate. We’d both been to events “on business,” feeling jaded. His business was keeping gentle tabs on the web of employees running the ticket booths, who carry out the small interactions he worked for decades to streamline. The joyful part happened after the crowd made it in, and we witnessed them experience the show — we watched their eyes glaze over, swooned into euphoria. It made us remember for ourselves what that felt like, and feel grateful to be a part of their experience, however invisible the fingerprint.

“Their desire to actually host a real music festival, Kilby Block Party, helped to shape a lot of the software that we developed toward that goal.”

It was that friendly quality about him, I thought, that set his business apart from his competitors. Among those is Ticketmaster, and if you’re not familiar with its multiple ongoing lawsuits, you’re a concert-goer living under a rock. The company is being accused of running an illegal monopoly and coordinating with scalpers. Credit card fraud and pricing fiascos within the industry also prompted a new law that requires ticket distributors to bundle their pricing up front — something 24tix had already been doing.

Taylor’s competitors were never what drove him, or his co-founder Ray Childs, though. Taylor focused instead on having partners he could trust, like the Salt Lake City Arts Council, a partnership he established roughly 15 years ago. “When they started charging for Twilight Concert Series events, they reached out to us and took a risk with us,” Taylor says. Fast forward to the present day, Taylor and Childs, along with their apprentice Ethan Fraatz, handle ticketing for a ballpark estimate of 2,000 concerts a year — some of them multi-million dollar ordeals.

Other partners like S&S Presents stuck out to Taylor because “their desire to actually host a real music festival, Kilby Block Party, helped to shape a lot of the software that we developed toward that goal,” he says. Taylor expressed a desire to fulfill the dreams of a partner who also had the customer in mind and wanted to do something cool for them. More recently, 24tix has been developing a way to integrate “access control” within the festival by upgrading wristbands to include hardware.

“There aren’t specific schools that teach much of what happens in the live music sausage factory, but the factory is always looking for fresh faces and new perspectives.”

It wasn’t always that streamlined, though. At one of the first events held in 24tix history, Taylor stood on the roof of the iconic, now-defunct venue Bricks (or later, In the Venue and Club Sound). There was a storm coming. Taylor stood there with Moby and the promoter and, already late to show-open by an hour, was informed there were complications downstairs. “The third person walked in and they were like, ‘Are you 24tix?’ and we were like, ‘Yeah!’” he laughed. “And they were like, ‘You fucking suck.’”

My curiosity piques as we speak about this slice of his life’s work. I ask what advice he would give to himself if he had to start from scratch in the present day, as a young person. To my surprise, he admits his early Y2K genesis would likely not be feasible now. He suggests finding someone to become inspired by and eventually take their baton — something he hopes to give away before he becomes “a real bonehead at a show.”

“There aren’t specific schools that teach much of what happens in the live music sausage factory,” he says, “but the factory is always looking for fresh faces and new perspectives.” Shocked by the welcome Taylor gave the dreamers, I reassuredly remembered the best person to buy tickets from is exactly that: a friend.

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