Founded in December 2013, launched in London in September 2014.

DICE began as a partnership between the music business and a digital product studio. TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas, reporting on 18 September 2014, the day the app launched in London on iOS and Android, wrote that the company had been founded the previous December by the two co-founders of the London studio ustwo, John Sinclair, known as Sinx, and Matt Miller, known as Mills, together with Phil Hutcheon, who had worked in music management and A&R for more than a decade. English Wikipedia says Hutcheon had run Modular Recordings and later his own label, management and events company, Deadly People. TicketNews, in a profile published in September 2019, likewise described DICE as launched in London in 2014 by co-founder Phil Hutcheon and ustwo.

The idea was Hutcheon’s, the engineering came from the studio. TechCrunch reported that Hutcheon had the original idea for a fan-focused music ticketing platform but that his experience lay in music rather than app development, and that his long friendship with Sinx was the trigger for ustwo to incubate DICE for about a year. The studio contributed people, with half of the launch team coming from ustwo, along with the technical know-how for a back end that could handle heavy ticketing demand and the design work on the app’s interface. DICE was based in ustwo’s Shoreditch offices at launch but was set up as a separate company, with ustwo as a shareholder and Sinx as head of product.

Curation was part of the product from day one. TechCrunch named the DJ Jen Long as DICE’s music editor, choosing which events made it into the app and writing the gig and band descriptions inside it, while Hutcheon worked his industry contacts to sign venues and promoters. He told the magazine that venues including the O2, Koko, Scala and Village Underground were on board from the start.

A ticket tied to one phone, and a queue for sold-out shows.

The ticket itself was designed to live only on the phone. Hutcheon told TechCrunch in 2014 that signing up triggered a text with a four-digit code that validated the handset, that DICE recorded the device and attached the tickets to it, and that reinstalling the app on a new phone made the tickets on the old one disappear. To show a ticket at the door, the app asked the user to hold a finger on the screen. The launch version also included alerts for when tickets went on sale and a waiting list for shows whose DICE allocation had sold out.

The waiting list grew into a fuller system. TicketNews reported in September 2019 that a fan who could no longer attend could return a ticket to DICE for a refund, after which the next person on the waiting list received a text and had an hour to claim it. The same profile described a Discover feature that let fans connect their music library so that the app could tailor event suggestions, and a scanning system called DICE Access, with the ticket turning into an animated QR code an hour before doors. English Wikipedia says DICE opened in the United States in September 2017 with events in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and opened a North American office in Brooklyn in 2021.

Ownership moves followed in the 2020s. Mixmag reported on 4 October 2021 that DICE had acquired the London music broadcaster Boiler Room, quoting Hutcheon as saying he had been speaking to founder Blaise Bellville for more than a year, and Bellville as saying that Boiler Room would remain its own independent entity. Bandwagon reported on 16 January 2025 that Superstruct Entertainment had acquired Boiler Room from DICE, with DICE continuing to run its ticketing. Pollstar reported that on 5 June 2025 the live-events discovery platform Fever announced it had acquired DICE; Fever’s release said artists, promoters and venues could keep using DICE as before, and quoted Hutcheon, as founder and chief executive, saying that since launching in 2014 DICE had stayed true to its mission to get people out more.

Vibrations, a punk typographic attitude and a fan-made logo.

For a ticketing platform, the ticket is the brand object people carry. It used to be a printed stub with a venue name, a date and a seat; now it is more often a screen in a phone’s wallet or app, with a barcode or QR code that has to be read in poor light, at an angle, by a scanner at the gate. That screen leaves little room for decoration: the platform’s name, the event title, the date and the seat must stay legible at a glance, and the colour behind them has to keep the code readable. The app icon carries the identity on the home screen, so a short name or a single letterform often does more work than a full logo. Many platforms also sell under a venue’s own name, which means the ticketing brand may sit quietly in a footer or a confirmation email while the venue takes the headline.

For a concert promoter, the identity lives mostly on posters, flyers and listings. The promoter’s name usually appears as a presenting credit above or below the bill, in a small, consistent lockup that has to sit next to band logos and venue names without competing with them. Because the bill changes every night, the promoter’s mark acts as a steady signature across very different artwork, from photocopied flyers to large festival line-ups. Venue partnerships add another layer: a promoter that books several theatres may keep each room’s own name and lettering while adding its credit to the listings, so the visual system works as a set of shared rules rather than a single look.

Be the Fan, a vibrating plate and a diamond with legs.

DICE has redesigned itself twice in-house. It’s Nice That’s Jenny Brewer reported on 25 February 2020 that a new identity had been created by the company’s own creative team under creative director Patrick Duffy, formerly creative lead at Airbnb. Duffy told the magazine that he spent six months on an earlier rebrand built around the line “make yourself unavailable”, which was scrapped, before the team settled on a new brand proposition, “Be the Fan”. To turn that into a graphic device, design lead Stewart Walker asked colleagues whether they had ever seen sound. The team hooked a Chladni plate up to a tone generator, scattered salt, sand and flour on it and changed the frequencies, then photographed, bitmapped and animated the resulting patterns. The brand guidelines deploy them at three “frequencies”: a single-colour graphic at low frequency, a large pattern with further layers at mid frequency, and crops, duplicates and a fourth colour at high frequency.

The 2020 typography was deliberately ordinary. Duffy told It’s Nice That that he brought the lo-fi values of the magazine Sleazenation, where he had worked in the early 2000s under creative director Scott King, to DICE’s type: Favorit as the principal face and Times New Roman as the secondary, rotated, squashed, skewed and condensed to add energy. The logo was left unchanged. Photography was turned towards the crowd rather than the stage, shot by local photographers including Sean Maung in Los Angeles, Keffer in Paris and Neelam Khan Vela in the UK.

Two years later the mark itself changed. It’s Nice That’s Liz Gorny reported on 4 April 2022 that DICE’s new in-house identity centred on a sketchy, diamond-shaped “fan” with legs, which began as a sketch on a train journey and was one of hundreds of notebook drawings; Animade and the animator Boy Tillekens brought it to life. Colour fields developed by Anni Haugan from the 2019 “Vibrations” started with a bucket of paint, oil and water before moving into After Effects. A typeface called Foggy, named after global head of music Andrew Foggin, was developed by head of design Stewart Walker with Oh no. “Fans don’t make corporate logos, they make zines, stick-and-pokes and placards,” Duffy told the magazine.

For a design guide, DICE shows how a ticketing company can build an identity from the experience of the crowd, using sound patterns, crowd-facing photography and a hand-drawn mark rather than a polished corporate system. Compare Boiler Room, the London broadcaster DICE owned from 2021 to 2025, and Songkick, another London-born concert app. For this guide we use vibration blue, fan black and paint pink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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