Your season closes strong. The house was full, donations came in, and the box office had its best run in years. You log in to check your payout. Nothing. You email your ticketing provider. A generic auto-reply bounces back. You call. No one answers.
That is not a hypothetical. It is what happened to arts organizations across the country: youth theater programs, community nonprofits, volunteer-run companies that ran their shows, sold their tickets, and then waited for money that was already theirs. And waited. And waited. ☠️
The company at the center of it: Brown Paper Tickets.
What Happened, And Why It Keeps Happening
In 2020, the Washington State Attorney General sued Brown Paper Tickets for failing to pay event organizers approximately $6 million and failing to refund ticket buyers $760,000 nationwide. The case settled for $9 million. (Source: Washington State Attorney General)
That should have been the end of it. It was not. The company was acquired, and that is when things get structurally dangerous.
When a struggling ticketing company gets purchased, existing liabilities get buried in transition timelines. New ownership makes promises. Deadlines get set, then extended, then quietly dropped. The organizations owed money stop being creditors with recourse and start being line items in someone else’s acquisition accounting. As recently as late 2024, organizations were still filing lawsuits over unpaid proceeds from 2023 events, years after the original settlement and through an entire ownership change.
The through-line in every single case: the ticketing company collected the money, held it, and the organizations had no direct access to any of it.
That Model Is The Problem
It is tempting to read this as a cautionary tale about one company. It is actually a story about a model. 🚨
Any time a ticketing provider sits between your patrons’ payments and your bank account, you have introduced a single point of failure into your revenue stream. If the provider has a cash flow problem, an acquisition goes sideways, or they simply stop responding, your revenue is trapped. You are an unsecured creditor waiting in line.
This is the default structure for most legacy ticketing platforms. They collect, they hold, they disburse on their schedule. You hope they stay solvent.
For organizations operating on thin margins, hope is not a financial strategy.
Your Gateway = Your Money
There is a better option, and it starts with one principle: the payment gateway (the system that processes and holds patron transactions) should be in your organization’s name, not your vendor’s.
When the gateway account belongs to you, patron payments flow directly into your merchant account. Your ticketing provider never takes custody of your revenue. There is nothing to “pay out” because there is nothing they held in the first place.
That is how UpStage is built. When a patron buys a ticket, donates, or renews a ticket package, the transaction clears directly into your payment gateway. We run the platform; you own the money flow. Our operational health is irrelevant to your access to your own revenue.
Before you sign with any ticketing provider, ask three questions directly:
- Who holds the payment gateway: Is the merchant account in your organization’s name, or the vendor’s?
- When do funds transfer: Is there a payout schedule, or does money move directly into your account?
- What happens if the vendor closes: Do you retain access to your funds regardless of the vendor’s status?
Every vendor that controls your money will tell you payouts are fast, support is responsive, and your money is safe. The only answer that actually protects you is a gateway account in your organization’s name, because that is the one answer that does not require you to take anyone’s word for it.
Ready to see how UpStage handles payment processing (spoiler: we never touch your money)? Schedule a demo!
