Industry Live Music Area served Global Founded 2007 Type of business Privately held company | Predecessor CrowdSurge Brands Songkick, Tourbox CEO Ian Hogarth (2007–) | |
Headquarters New York, United States Key people Mark McIntyre (CTO)
Josh Block (CSO)
Adam Ray (CFO) Founders Ian Hogarth, Michelle You, Pete Smith Profiles | ||
Songkick helps artists sell concerts directly to fans
Songkick is a website and mobile service that provides tickets and personalised calendars for live music events. It allows users to track their favourite bands, receive email alerts and purchase tickets when a tracked band plays a gig nearby, and sells tickets on behalf of artists worldwide. Songkick is one of the original high tech startups in London's Silicon Roundabout area.
Contents
Services
Songkick provides white-labelled concert ticketing service for major artists, including Paul McCartney, Ellie Goulding, Childish Gambino, John Legend, Kenny Chesney and The XX. They sell tickets for a wide range of artists on their website, providing tickets for more than one in three of all events in London. The service also allows users to track bands and receive alerts when those bands play concerts near the user's favourite locations. The site lists more than 100,000 upcoming concerts and its database contains more than 1 million artists. It also provides more than 2 million "gigographies" which are listings of historical concerts with user contributed data including reviews, set lists, videos and photographs.
Songkick provides mobile applications for iOS and Android devices, and a Facebook application that allows artists to list upcoming concerts on their Facebook page.
Songkick has more than 10 million monthly unique users, with more than 5 million of them located in the United States.
API and partnerships
Songkick provides a public API which allows access to their data and integration with other services. Services that integrate with Songkick's API include Spotify, Foursquare, Deezer, FanBridge, SoundCloud, Warner Music Group., Yahoo! Search, YouTube and Vevo.
History
Songkick was founded in 2007 by Ian Hogarth, Michelle You and Pete Smith and is based in the Shoreditch area of London. It was initially funded by the Y Combinator seed fund, receiving $15,000 and has since received investment from Index Ventures. By 2008 it had 7 employees and by 2011 had grown to employ 23. In 2012 the company became the first UK investment by Sequoia Capital when it received a £5.9m Series B investment.
In August 2010, Songkick announced content partnerships with both YouTube and Vevo.
In January 2011, the company hired Dan Crow from Google as their CTO.
In June 2011, Songkick launched an iPhone application.
In May 2013, the company launched Detour, which allowed fans to crowdfund a gig in their location.
In May 2014, Songkick announced it had more than 10m monthly users, and had generated $100m in ticket sales through referrals.
In June 2015, Songkick merged with CrowdSurge, the artist ticketing company. The combined company continues to do business under the Songkick brand with Ian Hogarth as Co-Chairman and Matt Jones (previously CEO of CrowdSurge) as CEO and Co-Chairman. Songkick has raised a further $29.2 million since the merger.
In August 2015, Songkick raised a further $15 million in funding from Access Industries.
Tourbox
In 2012, Songkick launched a service for musicians called Tourbox. This tool allows musicians and managers to control how their concerts are promoted to Songkick's users and across their distribution network. It automates the process of publicizing tour dates on any of Songkick's partner sites.
Ticket sales
Songkick's business model had been to refer fans to ticket vendors to purchase tickets for upcoming shows. In 2013, Songkick began a trial selling tickets directly to users. Tickets were initially sold direct to UK users and could be bought through Songkick's website and the iOS app. After Songkick's merger with CrowdSurge the combined company will sell tickets for more than 10,000 live music events per year in multiple countries.
In 2015, the company teamed up with Adele to implement an anti-tout strategy for her upcoming tour. 40% of all tickets in the UK were allocated through Songkick and required pre-registration in an attempt to identify touts and restrict supply to the secondary market. A total of 18,000 registrants were barred from purchasing tickets, having been identified as 'touts or potential touts.' Initial reports suggested this has been fairly successful, as the number of tickets appearing on resale sites were considerably lower than for comparable gigs. A study from Media Insight Consulting concluded that their efforts had saved fans £4.2m.
Awards
In 2009, Songkick was listed as one of the Telegraph's best cultural websites.
In 2010 Hogarth, Songkick's Co-CEO, won the British Council’s UK Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year award. In October 2010, Songkick won the Best Innovation Award at the 2010 BT Digital Music Awards. In 2011, Co-CEO Matt Jones was recognised as one of Billboard Magazine's "30 under 30" music industry rising stars.
In April 2011, Songkick was recognised as one of the Telegraph's top 100 startups in Europe.
Songkick was one of TIME's 50 Best Android Applications for 2013.
Merger with CrowdSurge
In June 2015, Songkick announced a merger of equals with artist ticketing service CrowdSurge. Following the merger, Songkick raised $19.2m in a Series C investment round led by Access Industries. CrowdSurge provided a white-label ticketing service that was used by over 500 artists to sell tickets directly to fans on their websites. The combined company continues to allow music fans to discover and track their favorite artists through Songkick's services, and buy tickets through both CrowdSurge's and Songkick's established ticket purchase services. The merged company will continue to be called Songkick. In December 2015, the combined company announced another $10m follow on from the Series C round earlier in the year.