Songkick, the concert discovery app and ticketing company (after it merged with white-label artist-to-fan ticket seller CrowdSurge), has raised a further $10 million in funding from previous backer Access Industries, owner of WMG. It follows a $16 million Series C from Access, Sequoia, and Index, announced in June.
In a blog post, Songkick is also disclosing that, post-merger, it has tripled ticket sales across Europe in the last 6 months, a strategy that has seen it partner with artists — including Kenny Chesney, J Cole, Jess Glynne, Metallica, Mumford & Sons, and Stereophonics — to enable them to sell more tickets directly to fans.
While the company says it remains dedicated to helping fans discover concerts they might be interested in attending, and therefore helping tackle the fact that 40-50 per cent of concert tickets go unsold every year, it’s now in the business of actually selling those tickets — and working directly with artists to do so.
That’s a strategy that perhaps plays into a changing music industry where streaming now dominates over paid-for downloads and artists are hoping to plug the gap in download/streaming revenues with increasing performance revenue. In other words, getting out on the road is where the real money is at.
At the same time, Songkick says it’s addressing another artist issue: that of ticket touts stopping real fans from buying their concert tickets without paying hugely inflated prices.
The company says it successfully worked with Adele to help her sell over 165,000 tickets for her U.K. and European tour directly to fans on Adele.com. It adds:
In the UK, Adele sold 40% of all available tickets herself, using our proprietary technology to identify and thwart over 18,000 known and likely touts, ensuring that as many tickets as possible found their way into the hands of fans. Our efforts resulted in a reported less than 2% of tickets appearing on the secondary market for what are surely the most anticipated events of 2016.