TicketSwap Thursday - Pt 2: Jannik Badnowitz, SHIFTED Festival

Welcome to Part 2 of this short series of podcasts brought to you by TicketSwap, the safest and fairest way to buy and sell tickets online.

In this episode, we speak with Jannik Badnowitz, a co-creater of Shifted Festival, the independent techno festival that has grown from a group of friends organising Berlin club nights and free raves into one of Germany's emerging community-focused electronic music events.

While the conversation explores the story behind Shifted Festival and its rapid growth, it also offers a fascinating organiser's perspective on ticketing, pricing and the role that resale plays in today's live events ecosystem.

We discuss how Shifted approaches ticket pricing, why early-bird tickets are so important for independent festivals, and the challenge of balancing rising costs with a commitment to keeping events accessible. Jannik explains how the festival's community-first philosophy influences everything from pricing structures and travel incentives to reduced-price tickets for those who might otherwise struggle to attend.

Trust is one of the most valuable currencies in live events so the conversation examines the growing importance of safe and transparent ticket resale as part of the responsibility an organiser has towards its customers. As a TicketSwap partner, Shifted adopted an official resale solution from the beginning to protect fans from scams, prevent excessive mark-ups and ensure tickets remain available to genuine attendees. We look at how organisers benefit from having visibility into resale activity, what resale data can reveal about audience behaviour, and why fair resale options are becoming an increasingly important part of the ticket-buying journey.

Along the way, we discuss ticket affordability, platform fees, the risks of excessive market concentration within ticketing, and whether primary ticketing companies operating their own resale platforms ultimately benefits fans. Jannik shares his thoughts on the importance of transparency, competition and maintaining fan choice within the wider ticketing ecosystem.

For anyone interested in the realities of running an independent festival, building a community around live events, or understanding how organisers think about ticketing and resale, this episode provides valuable insight from the front line of today's live music industry.

Shifted Festival takes place 06-09 August, 2026

Shifted Festival Homepage: https://www.shifted-festival.com

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shifted_festival

On Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/shifted-festival

Get the "Inside The Future Of Live Events - Backstage With Gen Z"  report: https://www.ticketswap.com/magazine/article/ade-report

TicketSwap Germany Partner Page: https://partners.ticketswap.com/de

TicketSwap Global Homepage: https://www.ticketswap.com

About TicketSwap: https://www.ticketswap.com/content/about-us

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ticketswap

On TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ticketswap

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ticketswap

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TicketSwap

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Transcript

TicketSwap Thursday, Pt 2: Jannik Badnowitz, SHIFTED Festival

[00:00:00] Podcast Series Intro

Paul: Hello and welcome to this short series of podcasts, mainly talking about the event space and the ticketing of events. This series is brought to you by TicketSwap, the safest and fairest way to buy and sell tickets online. We're going to be talking to an event organiser. We're going to be talking to an event goer about their place and their role in this whole ecosystem. We're also going be talking to the lead of TicketSwap in the German speaking territories to find out a little bit more about the impact the platform is having on the resale market. So that's what we're talking about. Let's get on with it.

[00:00:48] Meet Jannik Badnowitz

Paul: And we are here now with Jannick, who's an event organiser from Shifted Festival. How are you doing? 

Jannik: I'm doing good. Yeah. Thanks for the invite,

Paul: No problem. Thanks for coming along. 

[00:00:58] What Events Mean To You

Paul: Before we get started talking about your event, I wanted to ask you something that could be the most profound answer you've ever given to a question. I want to ask you what events mean to you? 

Jannik: Mm-hmm. It's a deep question if you think longer about it. I would say that going on events, especially techno events, quite a journey for me because, I started going to events as a guest like eight years ago, then started DJing and yeah, now switched completely to being an event organiser, first doing club events, now doing the Shifted Festival. So I really like the feeling of giving something back with the events because they made me such a great time in the past and now I am really happy if I can give this feeling back to the community. 

Paul: So it's a job that grew out of something that you love very much. 

Jannik: Definitely. 

Paul: That's the dream. Yeah. Nice answer. I like that. 

[00:01:54] About Shifted Festival

Paul: So tell us a little bit about Shifted Festival. Tell us what it is, where it is and when it takes place. 

Jannik: Yeah, so Shifted Festival was founded by a big group of my friends. So we all together made events in Berlin, like club events, free raves and stuff. And we said, okay, there's too much energy to just put it into the club events or like these smaller events. So we said, okay, after five years we now need to do something bigger. And that's why we started Shifted Festival. We sat again together like every Monday and talked about what will be the next thing that we do, and Lewis came up with this brilliant and really exhausting idea of organising our own festival. So we, threw everything we had into this idea, organised everything, booked DJs, stages, whatever you need. And yeah, hosted our first episode of Shifted Festival and now this year we are going into episode three and we're all really excited. So it grew a lot. This year we will be probably five times bigger than we were regarding the first episode. So yeah, we are all really proud and happy to welcome all the guests in August. 

[00:03:08] Forest Location Vibe

Paul: That's nice. So you've taken the club concept that you had in Berlin that worked and you've expanded that and you've put it in the middle of a field or a forest, actually in your case. You have this very beautiful location, don't you?

Jannik: Yeah, it's really nice. We made friends with the guys and girls that are organising the Back to the Roots Festival and yeah, we connected with them and they are also very open people and were happy to share their location with us and now we are bringing one month after their festival, our own vibe to the forest in Niedergörsdorf. 

Paul: Yeah, it reminds me of a little bit of some of the Scandinavian festivals I worked at. They love getting back to nature. 

Jannik: Yeah, the vibe in the morning when the sun shines through the leaves of the trees. So that's a perfect vibe. 

[00:03:55] Building The Event

Paul: Lovely. So how do you go about then, on a practical level, you say you have a team and you have these weekly meetings. How do you practically put something like that together? 

Jannik: So we learned it all by doing, and one thing that we did from the very beginning, even when we only organised like free raves in a empty field, was that we meet every Monday. So we do this for six years now in a row. So we had quite a few meetings by now and yeah, what we learned from the first festival was that everybody needs to have a a specialty to work on. And that's I think our key to get this much work done in just one year of time. We all do it besides our normal jobs because hosting this festival doesn't pay us anything. So it's quite the opposite. We have to give a lot for this festival and yeah, what we get back is a lot of fun. And also the feeling to grow something bigger and yeah, everyone feels this responsibility that everyone in our team has and that's I think, the key to hold everyone accountable and to give everyone the opportunity to grow themselves within their space that they're responsible for. And yeah, that works for us. 

Paul: So it's a nice collective of like-minded people. And you, you each have a role that you're responsible for. 

[00:05:20] What’s Your Role

Paul: What's your role - your special thing? 

Jannik: My role is to organise the volunteer management. So of course you need a lot of people that are working at the festival. Not only doing the preparation up front, but also like this year it will be 250 people that we need to work at the festival and I'm responsible for all of the 250 people to give them the right information, where they work, what is their job, what they have to look for. Yeah, 

[00:05:50] Audience And Genre

Paul: We didn't really say what your festival was. It's very much a specialist genre, I would say. It's an independent festival with a very specific audience. Is that right? 

Jannik: Yeah. So we book DJs from trance and groove and hard techno. So these are the genres that our team likes the most. And yeah, it attracts nice people. We really like partying with our audience. They are all very open, very like-minded. They care for the nature. For example, the camping ground was really tidied up compared to other festivals. So yeah, we are very happy about our audience that we attract. 

Paul: But being an independent event with a sort of niche or specialist audience, let's say, is that easier do you think, to manage and grow and connect with your audience? Do you think that's easier to do? 

Jannik: Yeah, connecting with the audience is a bit easier if you know who your audience is. And for us, our audience is young between 18 to 30, most of them around 25, I would say. So all of them, or most of them use social media. So this is also our main way to interact with them. We upload a lot of videos from us. We ask them for their feedback from last events, which DJs they wish for, to get this interaction that is needed for us to know what our audience expects from us for the next festival. And yeah, I think we also improved a lot by this. So yeah, feedback and the connection to the audience is really important and that's super nice, 

Paul: Very good that you have this direct contact then with your audience so you can develop the event knowing you're doing something that they like.

[00:07:38] Artists And Community

Paul: What about from the artists' side? What do artists like about the festival? 

Jannik: So, I can't speak for all of them, of course, but what the best stories are from artists is when they have their gig on Friday and stay for the whole weekend because all of their friends are also there and they just like to party also on the festival and have a good time. So I think for the DJs that we have a connection with, they also have a great time. 

Paul: Yeah, it's nice. Then if this becomes more like a lifestyle event, isn't it? People get away for a few days, including the artists and everyone just hangs out in the same place. It's wonderful thing. 

[00:08:18] Sponsors And Values

Paul: When it comes to partnerships, then on a business level, you're going to have to be very careful about who you do business with. You know, the different logos, the different brands that want to be part of the event. How does that work? Is that something that's quite complicated? 

Jannik: So, as I said, we put a lot of our time and also money into the project and therefore it helps to have sponsors on our side and before we go into negotiations with sponsors, we also think about if this would be something that we would be happy to have at our festival from the perspective of our guests. So we had talks on our team about sponsorships that we could have done or where we could have negotiated, but we said, okay, this would be not the right thing to get our guests in touch with. And now that we have grown a bit in the last years, we get into a nice position where we can also talk to more people that we are also interested in. For example, a nice beer sponsor. The beer we also like to drink. So yeah, that is really nice. And I would say also necessary because somebody has to pay the bills and if we can find an agreement where the guests win with nice products to buy and we can win. And also our sponsors of course, that's a nice thing.

Paul: I'm sure the audience don't mind having sponsors involved. As long as they align with your values and their values, they're quite appropriate. 

Jannik: Yeah, that's important. 

[00:09:53] TicketSwap As A Partner

Paul: What made you decide that TicketSwap was the right platform for you as a reseller? 

Jannik: So before we started the festival, we were also looking where to get tickets and wanted to go to events that were sold out and maybe even bought a ticket from someone who scammed you and sold the ticket to 10 other people. We were on the lookout for a safe option for our guests to not get scammed with our tickets because in the end, even though the scammer is the one doing the bad thing, guests have a bad feeling about the Shifted Festival because they couldn't go or were at the entrance, not let in or something. So we really wanted to eliminate this risk for our guests. So we partnered up with TicketSwap from the beginning and we choose TicketSwap because it's a super easy method to sell and buy tickets. It's a lot about fairness. So if you buy a ticket for 100 Euros, you can't sell it for a super overpriced price. 

Paul: Yeah, they have a cap, don't they? 20%. 

Jannik: Yeah. And yeah, I think that's a cool thing. So it's unlucky if you can't attend an event, but it's, I think, a bit unfair for everyone, like for the organisers organising the event to make money on your own just because you flip something you weren't even thinking about attending maybe. So I think that's really cool. I also used it for one event on my own, buying a ticket and yeah, I'm happy from both perspectives.

Paul: You have an event that really has to have credibility with the audience, with everything you do. That's got to be the lineup. It's got to be how you market it, got to be how it looks and feels, but it's also the partners that you work with. So TicketSwap really fits in with this, what I've seen about Shifted Festival, is there's a lot of transparency. The audience really trust you as an event. so that's a key decision in deciding to use TicketSwap. But how did the process go? Did you approach TicketSwap or were they in touch with you as an event already? 

Jannik: I have to admit, I don't know who talked to who first, but 

Paul: It was meant to be. 

Jannik: It was meant to be. Yeah. 

[00:12:07] Ticket Pricing Strategy

Paul: Should we talk about ticketing a little bit? 

Jannik: Let's do it. 

Paul: Just explain a little bit how your ticketing strategy works, how you came up with it. It's a very complicated process, isn't it? Especially when you're quite a new event and you're growing each year knowing how to find the right ticket price, knowing how much you need to have advanced sale and the resale market as well. It's very interesting to see how organisers are using the resale platforms now. 

Jannik: Yeah. 

Paul: Where do you come up with your price of your ticket now? What is it, 165 Euros? 

Jannik: Yeah. Right now it's 165 euros. We are doing a calculation of our costs and then try to ripple it down on everybody and try to make it as fair as possible for everyone to be able to attend the event. So we calculated the maximum price. As we know most of the people will buy it like in a few weeks before the festival, and then give everyone the opportunity to also buy cheaper tickets. We call them the super early tickets. We sell them for 115 Euros. So this is 50 euros cheaper than the most expensive ticket price because we really value people that support us in this early stage of planning the next festival. It's super important for us to have an ongoing cash flow. And yeah, this is how we come up with the price so there's not like some magic in there. We just have to pay our bills and we know how many people will come approximately and try to make a fair deal for everyone. 

Paul: Do you check with other events that go on in Germany or similar genre events around Europe to make sure that you're in line with how much it costs?

Jannik: We don't do it that way, so we don't make an analysis of what everyone else is charging for their festival and then adapt our prices to maybe be below them. But we try to see shifted festival from our, like, newcomer perspective. Everyone in our team has really learned what they're doing on the way, and I think this is what always made our events special because we didn't really look what others were doing and then copied them, but just thought about how we and our group would  wish for an event to be and then made it that way. Maybe you could call it also a bit naive to just run into it and see how it's going, but for us it worked that way. And I think also the people feel that we are not maximising every bit everywhere and squeezing out euros here and there. We just want a fair price for the people. We want everyone to afford their drinks and we also, on our side, want to pay our bills. That's why we give the incentive to buy earlier tickets. Also, we have some add-ons. Let's take the ticket price, 165 euros. There will be some extra costs depending on how you arrive at the festival. If you want to take your car at the camping space, you will need to pay a bit extra. If you don't come by car, which is better for the nature to come by train, you can buy a cheaper ticket for our shuttle bus that drives you from the train station to the campsite because we also want to incentivize people coming with open available vehicles and not everyone in their own car. Also, if you have more people in one car, the car ticket gets cheaper. So yeah, we want to also incentivize that. 

[00:15:52] Resale Trends Insights

Paul: How important is it that you sell out in advance and what behaviour of the audience have you learned? Do they buy early? Do a lot people wait? I read in the report that we have on our table here, something like half of Gen Z now use resale platforms - quite a lot. So are you finding that more and more people buying tickets are waiting a little bit later and using resale platforms to do that? 

Jannik: It's a bit hard to say because in the first two years we didn't sell out that much in advance, so only a few days before the event started to really have a lot of TicketSwapping ongoing. But I think this year it will become more relevant as we are estimating to sell out maybe even weeks before the festival. So yeah, I'm really excited to see what is going on on the tickets swap platform. I think right now there are 20 tickets online and I'm also happy that they are right now cheaper than the tickets that we sell, which is a nice way to be transparent about our pricing strategy. So the people see that there were cheaper tickets. If they want to, they can buy those cheaper tickets maybe if they can't afford or don't want to spend that much money on a ticket or have more money to spend on the bar. I'm just excited to see what's happening this year. 

Paul: How important is it for you to be able to see how many tickets are being resold and to be able to follow it? Is that something that gives you good information? 

Jannik: Yeah, so I get notified when a ticket is sold on ticket swap - or offered on ticket swap because I want to get a feeling of how many people want to give the ticket into the resale and also at which price. And I think right now the people that unfortunately can't attend the event are very fair in the pricing that they put on. As I mentioned, I think there are 20 tickets online right now and 75% of them are cheaper than the ones that we are selling in the shop. So it was really nice. Also nice to see that some people put it in for a much higher price, like I think 20, 30 euros more expensive, which shows me that there is like a value scene in the festival. So let's see if this ticket gets sold at some point. But it would just say that we created a good product that the people are also willing to pay more for. 

Paul: In a way, I guess having that resale option or that step in the process, it's a little bit like free marketing in a way. It's a way to keep people talking about the event, people talking about the value of the event, value of the ticket - lots of positivity about how easy it is to get a ticket and nobody being ripped off. Is this the feedback you get from your audience as well, that they really like how that works? 

Jannik: I think in the first two years we had a lot of mails of how can I give a ticket to a friend? How can I sell it? I can't attend the festival, unfortunately. And for this year, I think we only got one mail regarding how can I give my ticket back or give it to someone else. Give it to a friend. So I think, yeah, the people see this as an option and also as a valid option to sell their ticket on TicketSwap instead of writing to us.

[00:19:18] Promoting Resale Options

Paul: And you said before that social media is a very important method for you to have connection with your fans, to get feedback. How do you decide to use it to maximise as many ticket sales as possible to point people towards resale platforms? Do you have any particular strategies for that? 

Jannik: We have a strategy regarding resale, but at the moment it is for us, most important to sell, like on our platform, on our ticket shop, the tickets. So for us, the strategy is to first of course, push our own sales, and if we then weeks before the festival get sold out, we would switch this over to TicketSwap to, yeah, have not a single ticket unused for our event. 

[00:20:06] Fixing Ticketing Problems

Paul: What problems do you think there still are, even with the resale platforms? In ticketing in general, what do you think are the worst concerns?

Jannik: I would say rising prices as always in every case. And not just rising prices, rising ticket prices, because everything else got more expensive, but because someone is greedy. So I think this makes everything worse if some few people get too greedy. I think in the past you saw it with big concerts of big international stars that tickets went online for a fixed price, tickets went offline, tickets came back online for 10 times the price that they were initially put up. So yeah, I think this is not going into a good direction because from my perspective, it doesn't give the product a value that the product is worth, but just makes everything an auction for the highest bidder. And I think we definitely stand for quite the opposite. So we don't want just the highest bidder on our festival. We don't want just people that can afford it to be at our festival, but to have a very broad kind of audience, like different people from different regions, from different social levels. And therefore we are also looking for ways to make it affordable for everyone. So of course we can't just give our tickets for free because someone has to pay it and in the end we are then the ones to pay it. If we had an unlimited supply of money, that would be no matter, but that's not the case. But we see the problem that yeah, just not everyone has enough money or that even 165 euros is too much for someone. And even there, we try to find ways to make our festival as accessible as possible. So not just on the festival grounds only, but also on the economical and social way.

[00:22:08] Accessibility And Discounts

Paul: Alright, so you try to help your audience in how and when they can pay for tickets? 

Jannik: Yeah. 

Paul: So you have some kind of instalment policy? 

Jannik: What we do is to give the people the possibility to write to us and say, Hey, I can't afford the ticket at the price that is online right now. I am a student. I don't have a job at the moment. And then we're open to give out reduced tickets. 

Paul: Right. So it's very much part of your ideal of having your event as very much community based. That's important to you. And the ticketing is a big major part of that as well. 

Jannik: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:22:43] Fees And Platform Power

Paul: What, if anything, about ticketing then, What do you think still needs a lot of improvement even on the resale platforms?

Jannik: What's always annoying are like paying fees because for the guests, at some point when they think, okay, this is the price that I pay, then they click two times and then the price rises. That's always not nice, but I also wouldn't know how to change that. 

Paul: Yeah, right. But this is also a societal problem at the moment. If you're booking hotels, if you're using airlines, they all have these kind of hidden costs that you only find out at the end, don't you? This is one of the things people don't like about buying things these days, but as long as you have a transparent system for your ticket selling and reselling, then that's as much as you can ask for, I guess.

Jannik: Yeah. I think with what you see with all the platforms coming up for car sharing, living space sharing, there's really a problem in this platform business because this is, again, like only some few people getting a monopoly on one kind of business and earning a share by someone else doing work or providing a space to live or a car ride or something. And I think there's also the same problem with ticket platforms that are just a platform, but don't really do the effort that goes into this kind of events. So I would think it would be nice to like decentralise this a bit, give everyone the opportunity to host their own tickets or have like a ticket provider where not only one company is earning their share, but the ones that host the events, or maybe a fund that is giving back to the ones that do the events, which the platform couldn't live without.

[00:24:37] Primary Sellers Resale Debate

Paul: We are seeing quite a lot of primary ticket sellers now setting up their own resale platforms. 

Jannik: Mm-hmm. 

Paul: Do you think that that's going to help with transparency or is it something that might get more confusing the more control they have over the resale market? 

Jannik: I think yeah, putting too much, like, power into smaller groups or single companies is never good. I think it is good to always have the possibility to get rid of your ticket or to sell it if you can't attend for some reason. And yeah, you don't want to pay an insurance for this. But yeah, I think it would have to be in a friendly way and it would have to be in an open way so that you're not bound to this specific platform that you initially bought the ticket with so that you can still decide freely where you want to resell your ticket and maybe evaluate the fees that apply and have a way to have it interconnected and also maybe send your ticket from one platform to the other. This would, I think, be a nice way. 

[00:25:50] Wrap Up And Thanks

Paul: Yeah. Well, thank you for coming in and telling us a bit about your event. It sounds great. 

Jannik: Yeah, thanks. 

Paul: Lovely to hear about how you go about things, the partners you work with, the kind of audience you have and great that you're growing each year as well. So sky's the limit - or it depends how big the forest is, right?

Jannik: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. But there's the room to grow. Yeah. Thanks for the invite, the nice talk. 

Paul: Thanks for talking to us.