It’s safe to say the pandemic hasn’t exactly been good news for Resident Advisor. When it first hit, they were reduced to asking people not to ask for refunds on tickets – an act which was as much to save everyone else’s skin as their own. Staff were furloughed and put on reduced hours, and that’s just the ones they decided they just couldn’t keep on.

A bailout from Arts Council England for some £750,000 came in October, followed by a raft of changes in staff. A number of new writers being recruited, but the most notable news was new editor-in-chief Whitney Wei being appointed.

But one aspect of Resident Advisor that I somehow haven’t looked at yet is the ticketing side of the business. So let’s correct this glaring error right now – by having a look at good old Companies House to see what’s been going on. And it turns out the company was doing rather well.

As of 31st December 2019, Resident Advisor Tickets Ltd had £1,597,161 of net assets. This compares pretty well to 2018, when they had net assets of £1,319,607. Which isn’t bad going for a company which basically just takes a cut of tickets of other people’s events. But these are pre-pandemic figures, remember.

The 2020 figures should be available in early January, and rest assured I’ll be going back to have a good look at them. But what does the future hold? A source close to Resident Advisor informs me that ticket sales in 2021 have “held steady” and management reportedly describe the growth in sales as “encouraging”. They also told me “Strong growth will push sales to something closer to pre-pandemic levels during 2022.”.

So the future remains bright for at least one side of the Resident Advisor business. Now, if the editors could inject some fun, personality and interesting content onto the website, they might be onto something…