Would you pay a subscription fee each month if it meant you to easier access to concert tickets?

That’s the idea behind festivalPass, an Austin startup that has created a subscription marketplace where members can pay a monthly fee to have access to tickets to concerts, sporting events and other gatherings.

FestivalPass, which debuted in May, is designed to reduce the hassles and costs consumers face when buying tickets for live events, according to its founders, Ed Vincent and Stephan de Bernede.

The company's platform offers tickets to thousands events including music, lifestyle, film, art, sports, food and wine, and tech and innovation.  The platform also includes discounted rooms at over 600,000 hotels that can be booked the same way.

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FestivalPass members subscribe to one of three membership tiers, which are priced at $19, $49 and $99 per month. Higher tiers have lower costs for tickets and members also accumulate credits through the plans that can be used to pay for tickets and hotel rooms.

Vincent, the company's CEO, said festivalPass tickets come with no additional fees, which means that even with the monthly subscription payment, that results in lower prices overall.

“Whatever price you see on our site, and when you use it for an event, that's the price you pay at checkout,” Vincent said. “I feel there was always this lack of transparency, where you go on to many sites and it says $100 for the ticket and by the time you check out at $150 and I think it's a very frustrating experience.”

Vincent, who moved to Austin from New York to build the company, said Austin's status as a hub for both live entertainment and technology makes it the perfect spot to build out the company and grow the platform. .

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While the company is launching in Austin, the platform offers tickets to events all over the United States and lists hotel rooms globally. Once it grows more in the United States, the company also plans to feature event tickets globally.

"Since we're based here in Austin, we're going to continuously grow and market and do interesting cool things here in Austin so we can model out the successes we have n Austin in other cities along the way," Vincent said. "But today anybody in the country can sign up and they'll find events in any city they live in."

Vincent said the live entertainment industry is ripe for disruption. He pointed to Moviepass, a subscription serve that allowed people to see as many movies as they wanted in a month for a set fee. Moviepass shut down in 2019, but Vincent said it showed the demand for some kind of subscription-based service for live entertainment.

“We wanted to build a membership subscription in which people can become a member of this community, built around the passions that they really love, whether it's music, whether it's film, whether it's food and wine, whether it's sports, and actually still give them the value of acquiring a ticket to the thing they like to do, but also do it within a community so they can start interacting with fellow live event fans,” Vincent said.

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FestivalPass plans to negotiate perks with event venue owners that will be added over time. Beyond ticket sales, the platform also recommends events and gives members early access to ticket purchases and early access to purchase nonfungible tokens, collectible digital assets you can buy and sell, from artists.

The company also is embracing emerging technologies such as blockchain and NFTs as it builds out its platform. Users can make purchases with cryptocurrency, a digital asset that can be used to make online payments. Its also launching a "lifetime founder" NFT offering that gives purchasers a lifetime founder membership on the platform that gives them about $1,200 worth of credits each year and quarterly events.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin-based festivalPass launches subscription service for live events