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.”