Ticket search engine SeatGeek is best known as the place to find good deals on sports tickets, but it’s working to dominate ticketing for any live events, including concerts. It just announced its first partnership deals on the music side, with AOL Music (which is, yes, owned by the same parent company as TechCrunch), Pollstar, and Emusic.
Now, if you go to AOL Music, for example, and you’re looking at Justin Bieber’s tour dates, clicking on any of the “Get Tickets” buttons will take you to the relevant SeatGeek page. (For the record: Using Justin Bieber as the example was SeatGeek’s idea, not mine.) The page includes a list of tickets available from a range of other sites including StubHub, eBay, and TicketsNow, and a map showing where all those tickets would actually seat you.
Co-founder Jack Groetzinger says similar partnership deals (with publishers like Hearst and the New York Daily News) were crucial to growing SeatGeek on the sports side — he notes that the company, despite its success, is “not a major American brand by any means,” so these deals “help us reach people who would not normally hear about us.” Meanwhile, Lisa Namerow, GM of AOL Music and AOL Radio, calls SeatGeek “the most powerful ticket search interface online.”
The music side of the business is growing, Groetzinger adds. In April, SeatGeek sold twice as many music tickets as it did in December, and three times as many as it was selling in the fall. Plus, there are now more music events on the site than sports events (though presumably many of the sports events dwarf the concerts in size and sales).
Groetzinger says a big focus in the coming months will be event recommendations through Columbus, SeatGeek’s personalized events calendar. This is more important for concerts than for sports — as Groetzinger notes, if you’re a Yankees fan, “it’s not exactly difficult to figure out when the Yankees are playing,” but “it’s not trivial to figure out what shows you want to go to.”
SeatGeek is a ticket search engine. The site aggregates ticket listings for live sports, concert, and theater events and presents them to consumers within an elegant and powerful user interface that makes finding the best value on events tickets painless and easy. SeatGeek focuses on data. Its data engine is geared towards helping consumers identify the best ticket deals. The site has a feature called Deal Score™ that assigns a 0-100 metric to all listed tickets in order to ascertain...
Jack Groetzinger is the co-founder of SeatGeek, the largest event ticket search engine on the web, which he started in 2009 with Russell D’Souza. Jack focuses on SeatGeek’s product, analytics, finances, fundraising, and recruiting. SeatGeek was incubated at DreamIt Ventures and launched as a finalist at TechCrunch50. Less than a year after launching, the company was named as one of the “Top 100 Websites of 2010” by PC Magazine. Jack attended Dartmouth College, where he co-founded Evolving Vox, a furniture rental...
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