MyMusicTaste, a Seoul-headquartered service that lets fans campaign to bring their favorite artists to their city, plans to double the concerts it organizes next year after raising an $11 million Series C.
The round was led by KTB Network, with participation from Stonebridge and Yellow Dog. All three are new investors, while previous backers Softbank Ventures Korea, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Formation 8, Bokwang Investment and Golden Gate Ventures also returned for the Series C. MyMusicTaste’s total funding is now $22.3 million.
The startup was founded in December 2013 by chief executive officer Ethan Jaeseok Lee, who came up with the idea for crowdsourcing concert locations from fans while running a Korean fan site for Coldplay. At that time, Coldplay had yet to perform in Seoul, which perplexed Lee. Then he found out that planning tours is a risky venture even for popular artists and organizers risk losing a lot of money if they overestimate ticket sales. MyMusicTaste was created to take the guesswork out of choosing concert locations and dates.
The service now has 1.32 million users worldwide and works with 56 promoters and 30 agencies. MyMusicTaste has been used to plan more than 140 events in 32 cities. So far this year the startup has organized 41 concerts and it wants to increase that number to 100 concerts in 2018.
Even though it’s based in Seoul, almost all of MyMusicTaste’s users are outside of Korea. Lee tells TechCrunch that 37% come from Asia, 27% Europe, 20% North America and 14% South America, with the rest from Africa and Oceania. Last year, MyMusicTaste launched in 15 languages, which resulted in an influx of new users from Russia, France, Portugal, Indonesia and other countries.
The startup differentiates from other live concert services like Live Nation by focusing on user requests as a starting point for its concerts instead of promoting events that have already been organized. Once an event reaches a certain number of requests, MyMusicTaste gives users transparency about when the campaign started, when it began gaining traction and what the service plans to do next. After fans request live events, MyMusicTaste supplies the data to artists and event promoters.
The most popular genre on MyMusicTaste is Korean pop and the company claims to be the market leader in organizing K-pop concerts in Europe and North America. It also works with non-Korean artists like Dream Theater, Machine Gun Kelly and the xx, though it hasn’t succeeded in organizing a Coldplay concert yet (the group did stop in Seoul earlier this year as part of its Asia tour and Lee jokes that “I like to think that maybe they heard my pleas during all my interviews”).
Its Series C will be used to expand into more genres. MyMusicTaste also plans to open regional offices in Los Angeles, Europe and Southeast Asia and strengthen its data science and engineering team.