By Walt Frasier
I’ve been performing live for over 30 years. Music. Theater. TV. Commercials. Comedy. Improv. Murder mysteries. Kids shows. Times Square to touring nationwide. Thanks to the hustle balanced with training I am day job free since 2005.
I’ve sold tickets every way imaginable — on street corners, through the mail, on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and a dozen ticketing platforms that promised to change everything. I was a beta tester on Google Plus. What is that? Exactly.
Almost every platform started out changing things for the better. A few like YELP started as gatekeepers from day one. But most eventually fall to the pay to play model. The democratizing discoverability platform, one by one becomes a money making engine for the greedy at the expense of the artists and fans.
For a while, there was Goldstar
If you don’t know Goldstar, here’s what made it special: it was a discoverability platform. Not just a place to buy tickets. A place to find things you didn’t know you were looking for. A place where an unknown show could sit next to a Broadway production and win — not because of a marketing budget, but because the audience said so.
I know this firsthand. My show, Improv 4 Kids, became the top-rated comedy show in the world on Goldstar.
Not a Broadway show. Not a Netflix special. A scrappy improv show for familirs, built from nothing, running in New Jersey and New York City.
We beat massive competitors with million-dollar marketing budgets. We did it because Goldstar was fair. You couldn’t buy your way to the top. (Not at first). You couldn’t spam reviews. The only people allowed to rate a show were verified ticket holders. Real audiences. Real voices. Real democracy.
It was Yelp for live entertainment — but without the corruption. From day one YELP felt like the mafia. If you paid them $300 a month, the good reviews were featured. No pay, the bad reviews filtered up and your paying competitors featured above. And often the BAD reviews from from the competition. ANYONE could post just about ANYTHING.
In 2006, I was rehearsing our show at the World Famous New York Improv, the original comedy club. Thanks to hustle in Times Square, we were selling our 2 shows every Sunday and Monday. I met a guy named Marty Fisher. RIP. He was an interesting character. He was a deal maker. He brought the IMPROV name to the club owner on 53rd street that is now the Broadway Comedy Club.
He told me about Goldstar. For 15 years, Goldstar helped me fill seats and create a base income for public shows.
There are ticketing platforms. Producers spend big bucks and/or tons of time creating content to get traffic to websites to sell a ticket.
There are papering sites, professional seat fillers thay get paid but no money goes to the show.
There was GROUPON where most businesses lose money to aquire a new customer. If you can convert that customer long term, great. Most so many use Groupon to game the system. They will never come back and pay full price.
But GOLDSTAR was different. They sold a ticket and the artist got paid. They got paid. Maybe just $5-10 but the cost of that acquisition was ZERO. And GOLDSTAR patrons were savvy theater goers. The platform had a YELP like component. Ticket holders rated and reviewed shows. By the time it was murdered we had 1000s of reviews and a 4.3 out of 5 stars. The BEST comedy clubs in New York averaged 3.7ish.
Combined with a hand full of full price ticket sales, a few group sales, we were able to pay our actors a base rate for every show. This was not a showcase of improv players at a “school” where you pay $2000+ in classes for the honor of performing improv for free for 10-30 for other improv players and friends (HI MOM!). This was professionally PAID performers entertaining strangers from around the world performing 4-8 75 minutes shows every week, often sold out.
Then TodayTix Bought Goldstar
In January 2022, TodayTix Group acquired Goldstar.
The transition was framed as an expansion — more events, wider reach, a better experience for everyone. What actually happened was something very different.
Our ticket sales were cut in half. Almost immediately.
Not because our shows got worse. Not because audiences stopped caring.
Immediately tep platforms became one. Those two grocery stores that lived next to each other for decades suddenly had zero competition.
Suddenly a monopoly completely killed competition. Fans suffer too. Todaytix rates are much higher. Everything is more expensive.
TodayTix made deals. Exclusivity arrangements. Preferential treatment for certain producers. Broadway shows — already armed with massive budgets — were now also armed with algorithmic advantages on a platform that used to be a level playing field.
The little guys got buried. By design.
I’ve watched this happen over and over again.
The Pattern Is Always the Same
Every platform starts the same way. It needs creators. It needs content. It needs the scrappy independent artists who will hustle to build an audience because they believe in what they’re doing.
So in the beginning, the platform is fair. It has to be. That’s how it grows.
Then comes scale. Then comes monetization. Then comes the inevitable moment when the platform realizes it can charge for visibility. That the algorithm can be rented. That the little guys who built the community can be quietly deprioritized in favor of whoever is willing to pay more.
I’ve lived through this on Facebook. On YouTube. On Eventbrite. On every social platform that used to feel like a genuine community and now feels like a pay-to-play casino.
I never paid for ads. I couldn’t compete with Broadway show budgets. The one time I tried a small ad in a major publication, the ROI was zero. I would have had more fun lighting the cash on fire.
What worked — the only thing that ever consistently worked — was a fair platform that let real audiences discover real artists and decide for themselves what was worth their time and money.
That’s not a radical idea. That’s just honesty.
What We Actually Lost
When Goldstar died, independent live arts lost something specific and important.
We lost a platform with zero pay-to-play. No algorithm you could buy your way into. No ad sales team calling every week trying to sell you visibility you shouldn’t have to buy.
We lost a platform where the audience was the authority. Not a marketing budget. Not a publicist. Not a deal between a platform and a producer. The people in the seats.
We lost a community. Patrons who used Goldstar weren’t just buying tickets. They were discovering art. Building habits. Becoming regulars. Some of the strangers who found my shows through Goldstar are still coming back ten and twenty years later.
We lost discoverability for the independent artist. The thing that lets a show built with passion and craft compete with a show built with capital.
The Landscape Right Now
I get five cold calls a week from ticketing platforms.
There are more of them than ever. Every one of them promises to solve the discovery problem. Every one of them eventually becomes another cash register — useful for processing transactions, useless for building community.
Google just gutted organic search. Social media — once the great democratizing force for independent creators — is now controlled by a handful of soon-to-be trillionaires who have made it clear that visibility costs money. The algorithm rewards whoever pays. Everyone else gets buried.
The independent artist is being squeezed from every direction.
And the audiences feel it too. There’s a growing backlash against algorithmic content, against AI-generated noise, against the sameness that comes when every platform optimizes for engagement over authenticity. People are hungry for something real. Something human. Something that happens in a room with other people and can never be replicated on a screen.
Live arts is the answer to that hunger. But only if people can find it.
What We Actually Need
We don’t need another ticketing platform.
We need a new Goldstar.
A platform whose entire purpose is to connect independent artists with real audiences. Where discoverability is democratic. Where you cannot buy your way to the top. Where the only currency is the quality of your work and the honesty of your audience.
A platform where a kids improv show in an off off broadway theater can become the top-rated comedy show in the world — because the people in those seats said so.
A platform that serves artists and fans equally. That builds real community. That keeps zero algorithms between a performer and the audience that would love them if they could only find each other.
A platform that remembers why live arts matters in the first place.
Not content. Not product. Not inventory.
Experience. Community. Human connection.
The arts have survived every platform that tried to own them. They will survive this moment too.
But they deserve better tools. They deserve a fair platform. They deserve a place that is genuinely, structurally, permanently on their side.
That platform should exist.
It needs to exist.
And the artists and audiences who built communities on Goldstar — the ones who know what a fair platform actually feels like — deserve to have it back.
Walt Frasier is a comedian, actor, improv artist, producer, and promoter based in New Jersey with over 30 years in live performance. He is the founder of 8 Improv Theater and the creator of Improv 4 Kids and Madcap Mysteries.
If this resonates with you — as an artist, a venue, or a fan of live arts — share it. The conversation starts here. EMAIL ME! SOMETHING IS COMING!
Walt Frasier 