Brown Paper Tickets

SEATTLE – If you're looking for a seat at the Rat City Rollergirls' next bout, it's not Ticketmaster you'll be logging onto.

A Seattle-based Web site known as Brown Paper Tickets has found a niche among indie performers and producers.

The site bills itself as "the first and only fair-trade ticketing service," and promises the smallest service fees in the business.

"Our current mission is to fix the ticketing industry," said company CEO Steve Butcher.

The company was started seven years ago by a Seattleite named William Scott Jordan, who ran an events listing Web site called EventNation.com. On an online forum, he noticed a long-running discussion on how unhappy customers were with user fees.

"He realized somebody needed to come up with a solution and thought, why not me?" said Carley Borgen, Director of Marketing.

The business crafted an online " Ticketing Bill of Rights," which is displayed on its Web site. The first two items read: "Service fees should be fair and consistent," and "There should never be any setup costs."

Brown Paper Tickets charges 99 cents, plus 2.5 percent of the ticket price for each ticket sold.

"We don't have scaled service charges," Borgen said. "Our service charge is the same, no matter what the ticket price is."

The business also adopted a business model known as " Not-Just-For-Profit," which asserts that by focusing solely on profit, companies will destroy their long-term business growth. Instead, the business model stresses the importance of community, ethics and the environment. Brown Paper Tickets donates 5 percent of profits back to the community.

They seem to be on to something.

Butcher said the business has tripled its market size each year. This year, the business is managing at least 30,000 events.

"We're beginning to be seen as the independent alternative to the non-alternative ticketing companies," Butcher said. "We're not going to charge you a set-up fee when you haven't even sold a ticket. From that standpoint we're attracting and encouraging people to be successful - when they're successful they come back to us. We end up kind of fostering communities of performance."

They attract niches like belly dance, roller derby and cooking classes. One particular group they've noticed is the "Slow Food" Movement.

"It's the ideal that the more involved you are with entire process – of the growing of food, preparing of food, enjoying of food - the more nourishing it is for the body and community as a whole," Borgen said.

The site serves San Francisco, New York, Austin, Texas and Minneapolis, Minnesota, to name a few. In Seattle, you can buy tickets to burlesque shows, Pike Place Market food tours, comedy shows and theater performances.

At the same time Brown Paper Tickets is attracting niche activities, it's also filling the need for traditional symphonies and operas, including the Eastside Symphony and Bellevue Philharmonic. One of the larger events they're working this year is PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo in August in downtown Seattle.  

"We're picking up speed because we're in more geographic areas than ever before, able to handle a larger variety of events," Butcher said.

Their next project is helping musicians safely tour the country. They're compiling a directory of safe venues to help artists plan tours in cities they've never visited. The directory will debut in roughly a month.

In the meantime, they'll continue their goal of "fixing the ticketing industry."

"It would be great if everybody realized they're doing it wrong," Butcher said. "They have to listen to their customer. We just want events to happen. We want people to survive as artists and performers and have classes."