StubHub Music is now live in the App Store and available to all major U.S. cities. The app, created by ticket reseller platform StubHub, was first tested on a much smaller set of music fans in San Francisco earlier this summer. It’s now available throughout the U.S., the UK and Canada.
StubHub, which is currently seen as a competitor to ticket-buying marketplaces like Ticketmaster, created the app in hopes of engaging a wider audience on the hunt for local concerts. It’s recently been expanding its music offerings and looking at ways to engage fans in a way that could take them from initial discovery to actually purchasing tickets. And, as StubHub spokesperson Smita Saran pointed out, people are increasingly discovering things around them on their mobile devices.
The app is particularly convenient for discovering what sort of entertainment is around you while traveling. StubHub Music comes with an “adjust radius” feature that allows you to find out what’s going on within a certain area.
StubHub Music makes event recommendations for you based on a scan through your iTunes music library. It then shows you upcoming concerts happening near you and allows you to click through and purchase tickets, whether those tickets are available on StubHub or elsewhere. Like WillCall or Live Nation Entertainment, the app also sends push notifications to alert you when a determined favorite artist is headed to your city.
“This isn’t about driving traffic back to StubHub, necessarily,” said Saran. “It’s about finding ways to engage with people.”
The infrastructure is already there to make this app into a one-stop shop from discovery to purchase. The eBay-owned platform is close with subsidiary PayPal. Saran says the app takes users through to the StubHub website for purchase at the moment but says the app will continue to expand features. It plans to integrate StubHub’s “GoTogether” feature down the road so people can not only discover but also bring their friends along and even split the purchase of tickets as they became available nearby. The “GoTogether” feature is currently part of the StubHub core services.
“Our goal is to integrate with different music services to better understand a user’s music tastes and build a more customized experience,” said Saran. This could be Spotify, Pandora or a number of others yet to be determined for the company. Saran didn’t name anything specific but did mention that StubHub will be adding new features and functionality over time.
The app currently allows users to share, email or message friends to invite them to an event and share the experience after the event.
“This is an app that creates a way to take local music discovery to a national scale,” said Saran. “That’s the big picture here.”